Numbers never lie. Or do they? With government, it's simply a matter of who's keeping the books. Take America's so-called war on drugs, for instance. Last year, Congress earmarked nearly $19 billion—nearly twice what it spent on military operations in Afghanistan—to enforce U.S. drug laws.
How does the public sector decide that it is a good idea to explore space instead of spending the time, resources, and talent on other scientific explorations or, for that matter, some other area like building a road? Tibor Machan, for example, likes the idea of ocean living but few seem to agree with him.
Contrary to Keynesian dreams, there are several undeniable realities of a recessionary environment, writes Lew Rockwell. Wages tend to fall. Businesses tend to be liquidated. Resources are withdrawn from investment and put into savings. Consumers spend less. Stock prices fall. All of these tendencies may seem regrettable but they are necessary to bring all sectors back into realistic balance with each other.
Despite Mayor Bloomberg's recent 18% tax hike, despite his promise that next year the hated city income tax will be hiked, another tax increase beyond these is looming on the horizon for New Yorkers. It is a tax increase that is another result of generations of municipal and state mismanagement.
Even apart from Hans Hoppe's policy prescription--that private ownership ought to characterize all of society, economy, and government, while all public ownership should be banned as a form of theft--his thesis offers a highly fruitful framework for understanding everyday political affairs. Jeffrey Tucker explains.
There is a way out of the current economic mess, writes William Anderson: Stop the government merry-go-round. Malinvested resources must be permitted to be liquidated, government spending must be cut back, and the central bank must not try to "reflate" the currency or the stock market.
Arthur Andersen's transgressions have opened the doors to unbridled regulatory madness, writes Karen De Coster. The effect of legislation (like CARTA) will be to replace the oversight bodies that currently watch over the accounting profession with regulators who will do an even worse job of it.
Social Security is not an insurance program. A Social Security "account" bears no legal resemblance whatsoever to a bank checking or saving account. Social Security bestows no contractual rights or any other type of property right on workers. In other words, Social Security as it is currently structured has nothing to do with legally enforceable promises or guarantees.
It is ironic that America is often derided by some critics for its rough-and-tumble capitalism--hence, these critics maintain, the need for government interventions of every kind. Reality, however, is quite different; America’s brand of capitalism seems to enjoy freshening the wells of failure. In America, if you’re big enough and rich enough, or if you have a world-class lobbying team, you can get the American taxpayer to underwrite your failures.
The policies the Fed cooked up during the mid-1990s that brought on the unsustainable boom (mistakenly called the "New Economy") are also the policies that Greenspan employed in the last year, ostensibly to give us a "soft landing." The government is now engaged in a number of foolish regulatory ventures that certainly will make economic life more difficult as we seek to climb out of this latest downturn.
