Interventionism

People who favor having federal goons arrest undocumented workers and send them home imagine that this is a great thing for American culture and so

Presented at the Mises Circle in Manhattan: The Fed and War Finance (16 September 2006, University Club, New York, NY).

History reveals that prohibitions are indeed classic examples of the co-opting of public-spirited intentions by rent seekers within the political process, thereby explaining the existence of what at first appears to be irrational policies.

From the book What Has Government Done to Our Money? Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

Rent seeking is a search for privilege and personal gain through the political process. Rent seeking is distinguished from corruption in that rent seeking is legal and corruption is not.

Since abilities and interests are naturally diverse, a drive toward making people equal in all or most respects is necessarily a leveling downward. The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child?

From the book What Has Government Done to Our Money? Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

We can have no confidence that the Stiglitz model captures the essential aspects of real world economizing that it purports to. We therefore can have no confidence in any belief that rests upon this or similar theories that government has a proper role to play in increasing economic efficiency or social welfare by use of taxes, subsidies, and transfer payments.

Once and for all, I'm going to target the main motivation for minimum wage advocates in academia: politics.

The poor are able to acquire household items that in some cases no one, rich or poor, could have had even a generation ago, and on terms that no one else is willing to extend to them.