"The rationality, the effectiveness, and the justice of public policy which taxes enterprise according to one assumption while it gears, say, profit-incentive policies to its opposite is at least dubious."
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.
Public buildings in the United States are islands of socialism in a sea of free enterprise, so the materials and workers are there.
There will come a day that the world financiers will rush from dollars just as they have recently rushed into dollars, causing even worse chaos in
We can see the strength of the case for economic freedom even more clearly through proper economic theorizing. Free-market economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises arrived at the proper conclusions regarding socialism and interventionism long before the evidence on modern state planning was in.
But defending property rights - the only basis on which society can possibly exist in peace - is a worthy cause, and there are not nearly enough people doing it.
A free society includes the freedom to be unconcerned, insensitive, or stingy. If the forced looting of the taxpayers for foreign-aid payments has always been wrong, then — cyclone or no cyclone — it is just as wrong now.
With time rightly identified as a scarce resource, economic theory is needed to understand the interchange process. And there is no place for the "freeconomics" of Chris Anderson.
Dr. Block and Dr. Jared Bernstein (Economic Policy Institute) debate the minimum wage on 8 March 2008.
