Intended Consequences
The purpose of the Patients' Bill of Rights is to destroy HMOs and pave the way for the complete socialization of American health care. William Anderson explains.
The purpose of the Patients' Bill of Rights is to destroy HMOs and pave the way for the complete socialization of American health care. William Anderson explains.
Facing a crisis, their primary concern is political survival; to admit their culpability and liability would be committing political suicide. Therefore, they rant and rave, always pointing toward the producers of energy. It is they who heartlessly, scandalously, viciously, and immorally conspire to create energy shortages in order to reap exorbitant profits.
They hail from Harvard, Yale, and Cornell, but these economists haven't learned the first lesson of economics. William Anderson corrects their errors.
What are prices and what do they reveal about future events? Gene Callahan explains.
The Governor's supposed solution to the energy fiasco promotes the fiction that government solves problems that private businesses create.
Production and price controls, not deregulation, are the cause of the state's energy miseries, writes George Reisman.
The economic ignorance of politicians and bureaucrats never surprises me, and the recent events concerning rising oil prices are no different. Recently Sen. Dick Durbin (D- Illinois) accused the oil industry of "gouging" the public stating "It's an increase directly attributable to profit-taking by the oil companies." EPA Secretary Carol Browner said "The oil companies . . . owe us an answer." So it went throughout the Clinton administration and Gore campaign, as spokesman after spokesman issued condemnations wrapped in fallacy.
Good economic reasoning advises sharp constraints on the size and scope of government. Don Mathews says Gore's bad economics is merely a political tool.
For the GOP's vice presidential nominee, oil prices shouldn't be too high or too low, but rather exactly what the government wants them to be.
University students are going berserk again. No, they are not swallowing goldfish, going on panty raids or stuffing themselves into phone booths, the excesses of a bygone day (the first two are now politically incorrect, and what with modern technology there is nary a phone booth to be found). Nor are they taking over deans' offices and entire college campuses in the name of stopping their institutions from buying real estate in surrounding poor communities. Nor, yet, at the moment, are they protesting in favor of the environment, or bashing free trade, other favorite activities of theirs. What, then, you may ask, are they up to nowadays? They are insisting that the university logo t-shirts and baseball caps sold in campus stores not be manufactured under sweatshop conditions, nor with contributions from child labor.