February 16, 1887
I return without my approval House bill No. 10203, entitled “An act to enable the Commissioner of Agriculture to make a special distribution of seeds in the drought-stricken counties of Texas, and making an appropriation [of $10,000] therefor.”
It is represented that a long-continued and extensive drought has existed in certain portions of the State of Texas, resulting in a failure of crops and consequent distress and destitution.
It is hardly a secret that Pope Francis opposes the free market. On what grounds does he do so? Do any of these grounds have merit? What are the sources of his ideas? How similar are his views to those of previous Popes? These are among the questions addressed by the contributors to an important new book, Pope Francis and the Caring Society, edited by Professor Robert M. Whaples.
In 1828, Congress passed a tariff that raised duties on various imports to such extremes that it become pejoratively known as the Tariff of Abominations. In protest of these high duties, Vice-President John C. Calhoun secretly wrote The South Carolina Exposition and Protest, denouncing the “unconstitutional, oppressive, and unjust” bill.
We’ve known for a while now that Donald Trump is not a fan of Jeff Bezos or Amazon. Tweets from the President confirmed prior reports that he takes particular exception to the rates the US Post Office charges Amazon for their delivery services, as well as voicing your standard protectionist concerns about how delivery services threaten brick and mortar businesses.
[Newsweek column from September 22, 1947, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.]
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. Lenin was certainly right. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
[Newsweek column from February 3, 1947, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.]
[Newsweek column from May 7, 1956, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.]
Keynesism—the philosophy of big government spending, deficit financing, and continuous inflation—today dominates the policy of nearly every government in the world. Yet developments in the last few years have destroyed its central prop.
[Newsweek column from February 20, 1956, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.]
H.L. Mencken, who died on Jan. 29, was the outstanding American literary critic of his generation, its most influential stylist, its most prominent iconoclast, the chief scourge of the genteel tradition, and a great liberating force.
[Newsweek column from May 16, 1955, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.]
Once a government bureaucracy has been set up to do any job whatever, it will find endless excuses for expanding, prolonging, or perpetuating that job. This is the sad history of our postwar foreign aid.
