Coercive transfers are wasteful, inefficient, and inequitable. The Left uses Demand-Side Dogma to instill false legitimacy into these policies, writes D.W. MacKenzie. The Right, including the Bush administration, plays along with this rhetoric all too often.
The Spitzer settlement is a travesty of justice. If it is true that individuals in the securities industry perpetrated fraud in order to garner investment banking fees, they should be criminally prosecuted and punished. Only a corrupt politician would ignore possible crimes in return for an industry’s support in future political campaigns. The liberal New York democrat helped himself, not investors.
The litany is familiar to anyone who knows of the history of the Great Depression: miscalculation, overtaxation, keeping wages and benefits high, prevent the liquidation, boost consumer demand, run up public debt. Fritz Machlup said that this is the path to impoverishment, notes Sean Corrigan.
If the pundits and politicians ever succeed in imposing the draft again on American citizens, for purposes of bolstering the military empire or doing social work, writes Jeffrey Tucker, they will have to look for support outside the libertarian tradition. Mises is not enlisted in this cause.
Rothbard makes sense of these complex events in American banking history--power struggles, recessions, foreign relations--wielding the principles of monetary theory and Austrian business cycle theory, which he explains very well, on the run. Joseph Stromberg reviews A History of Money and Banking in the United States.
William Anderson suggests a new slogan to fight the recession: It's the liquidation, stupid. While he doubts that the motto will catch on with Bush and his political rivals, in the end, it really is the liquidation. Those who ignore this kernel of truth really are the stupid ones.
Many of the most interesting issues in economics derive from a lesser-known category of alleged market failure: so-called asymmetric information. The problem of asymmetric information is simple. Different people know different things about economic goods. However, rather than indicting a need for government intervention, asymmetries in information make the free operation of markets all the more important.
Does justice permit people to be charged for services that they do not use? Certainly not. But this is the very essence of government. One family in Michigan decided that they wouldn't take it anymore, fought city hall, and won. Adam Young tells the story.
The idea that commerce and war are allies is a complete perversion of the old liberal tradition. The first theorists of commerce from the 16th through the 18th centuries saw that a most meritorious aspect of commerce is its link to freedom and peace, that commerce made it possible for people to co-operate rather than fight. It made armaments and war less necessary, not more.
The demise of HealthPlus illustrates the unintended consequences that accompany any government intervention of market forces. In this case, writes Christopher Westley, federal regulations require private owners of hospitals to provide health care to all comers. In this sector, this cannot be done at a profit.
