U.S. History

Far from an example of a market failure, Enron's saga shows that firms that invest too much in politics can easily become complacent in the face of changing market conditions.  In economics, this is called government failure, and we can blame the growing requirement for firms to divert resources to grease palms in Washington as a necessary business investment for its occurrence.

While the facts (as we know them today) of the Enron debacle are easily available in most newspapers and on the Internet, they are accompanied by a number of myths that are being spawned by politicians and their media allies.  William Anderson tackles a few of these economic and political "old wives' tales" and helps set the record straight.

The master teacher of American economic history covers money and banking in the whole of American history, to show that the meltdown of our times is hardly the first. And guess what caused them in the past? Paper money, loose credit, reckless...

Successful people who earn their wealth through free and peaceful exchange may choose to give some of it away, but they'd be no less moral and no less debt-free if they gave away nothing.  It cheapens the powerful charitable impulse that all but a few people possess to suggest that charity is equivalent to debt service or that it should be motivated by any degree of guilt or self-flagellation.

Professor Fletcher’s book brings to mind a remark by Yvor Winters, in a review of C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Winters praised Lewis for his grasp of the facts,

Each time America has become politically involved in the Middle East, the results have been the same: U.S. demonization of a single man grows a once-shadowy or despised crank into a popular hero of the Arab masses--the Arabic or Islamic David that dares to stand up and confront the U.S. oil dominion over the Arab world.

Presidents assume near dictatorial powers during wars, and FDR was able to manipulate World War II to provide moral legitimacy to his domestic agenda. With the war, Roosevelt could boast of eliminating unemployment at home while fighting evil abroad. Not a bad deal.

Either the U.S. should reclaim its traditional policy of free trade and peace and thereby end its international military interventions, or it should wage unrelenting war against any group or government that resents and predictably responds to U.S. policy.

Barry Goldwater's campaign for the presidency in 1964 decisively influenced American conservatism. At last, a candidate who dared to challenge the prevailing liberal consensus! 

Why do economists like Becker and others who say they favor free markets blindly support antitrust laws in all of their wretched excesses?