The Champion Inflator - Higher Education
I read where tuition and fees at private colleges are up 5.9% this year. well, first of all you know that number is no more reliable than the polls of KIm Jong-II’s popularity taken on North Korean streets — with the secret police standing by: about as meaningful as sticker prices on a lot full of Kias. I mean 75% of students get some kind of financial help. Gee, I wish I was an economist. Maybe then I could understand why amidst all the services and commodities that bless our world — college costs win the silver trophy every year. Up, up, up, and up they go.
The Death Camp of Communist China
A hysteria of sorts has been generated by reports that some of China’s products lack quality control. It’s incredible to think how historically insular this frenzy appears in light of the history of modern China, which was the laboratory of one of history’s great central planning catastrophes. Following collectivization of land, Mao decided to go further to dictate to the peasants what they would grow, how they would grow it, and where they would ship it, or whether they would grow anything at all as versus plunge into industry. This would become the Great Leap Forward that would generate history’s most deadly famine.
Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty
[This article is taken from the final chapter of The Ethics of Liberty. Listen to this chapter in MP3, read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book has now been prepared for podcast and download.]
The elaboration of a systematic theory of liberty has been rare enough, but exposition of a theory of strategy for liberty has been virtually nonexistent.
Attorney Acquitted on Federal Income Tax Charges
A federal jury unanimously found Tommy Cryer not guilty this week on two misdemeanor counts of failure to file.
And according to Cryer, the prosecution dismissed two felony charges of tax evasion prior to trial...
Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State
F.A. Hayek and the Concept of Coercion
[This article is taken from chapter 28 of The Ethics of Liberty.1 Listen to this chapter in MP3, read by Jeff Riggenbach.
Isaiah Berlin on Negative Freedom
One of the best-known and most influential present-day treatments of liberty is that of Sir Isaiah Berlin. In his Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin upheld the concept of “negative liberty”—absence of interference with a person’s sphere of action—as against “positive liberty,” which refers not to liberty at all but to an individual’s effective power or mastery over himself or his environment.
Redistribution vs. Charity
It is a commonplace, for libertarians at least, that coercive redistribution cuts into charity by reducing the funds available for charitable giving. But Arthur C. Brooks, in his book Who Really Cares, points to another effect of redistribution on giving... To be precise, an effect of a belief in redistribution. From an interview with Brooks in the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty:
The Green Economics of Gore
Please note that I do not subscribe to the panicked cries of human-induced, carbon-based global warming. But, just for fun, let’s assume that the cries are indeed true.
Ever since Mises exposed the negative effects of government interventions, politicians, bureaucrats, and most economists have attempted to refute those truths. A leading fallacy still driving debates and discussions is the one which implies that government can borrow goods from the future in order to satisfy its current demand. That simply cannot happen.
