Corporate Welfare

Presented to the Auburn University Economics Club, Auburn, Alabama, on 14 October 2008.

For the economy and country to begin healing, we need capital, credibility and authority to move from the wasteful to the productive. The power elite, predictably, is attempting to achieve the exact opposite.

Personally, I am still a long-term optimist, but as a student of the Depression I know that Congress and the executive can do much damage before the long term gets here, and indeed, they can delay its arrival indefinitely.

The Paulson Plan is one more step in the socialization of America, but it is also a great bank robbery.

At the root of the problem are not mortgage-backed assets as such but the Fed's boom-bust policies.

Wars are a principal means for the state to increase its power.

Reminiscent of a juvenile accepting a dare to do something stupid, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Christopher Dodd, crowed t

This situation is not, however, a natural market phenomenon, but the direct result of various government programs — usually in the world's most developed economies, although developing countries are catching up — that aim to promote more environmentally friendly energy technology or energy self-sufficiency by subsidizing and mandating the diversion of a growing percentage of agricultural commodities such as corn, sugar cane, wheat, and so on, to the production of bioethanol and biodiesel.

Shareholders must fight to uphold the legitimacy of the profit motive and reject the view that merely having an "interest" in the operations of a company implies a right to control.

 The advantages of the corporate form — limited liability and raising capital — have been known for as long as mankind has had the technology to produce useful things whose production is too expensive for a single investor to handle.