The government’s persecution of Microsoft continues unabated. The U.S. appeals court is now considering whether the Bush administration and 19 states negotiated an adequate settlement in their antitrust case against Microsoft. It’s time for the American...
History has seen many calls for minimum wages for the same reason — to eliminate competition with workers who’d work for less.
They say “truth will out” but sometimes it takes a long time. For more than half a century, it has been a “well-known fact” that President Franklin D. Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That view was never pervasive...
I have warned many times of the dangers of homeowner’s associations (HOA’s). As I speak around the nation on the subject of “Sustainable Development,” an environmental term intended to disguise the elimination of property rights, inevitably...
In a recent column, I defended supply-side economics from an attack by Princeton economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times Magazine. One of the rare civil criticisms I got came from my friends at TAPPED, the web log of the liberal American Prospect magazine. Their...
Acts of dishonesty and fraud have no more essential connection to business activity than they do to the practice of medicine or the performance of music or to any of the arts or sciences.
In contrast, however, the interventionist ideas, the socialist ideas, the inflationist ideas of our time, have been concocted and formalized by writers and professors. And they are taught at colleges and universities. You may say: “Today’s situation is...
People say that every civilization must finally fall into ruin and disintegrate. There are eminent supporters of this idea. One was a German teacher, Spengler, and another one, much better known, was the English historian, Toynbee. They tell us that our civilization...
Under interventionist ideas, it is the duty of the government to support, to subsidize, to give privileges to special groups. The idea of the eighteenth century statesmen was that the legislators had special ideas about the common good. But what we have today,...
In the Age of Enlightenment in the years in which the North Americans founded their independence, and a few years later, when the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were transformed into independent nations, the prevailing mood in Western civilization was optimistic. At...
Rent controls don’t work, and its advocates know it.
What needs to be realized is that there are two distinct causes of generally falling prices. One is the increase in production and supply, which should never, never be confused with deflation, depression, or poverty. The other is a decrease in the quantity of money and or volume of spending in the economic system.
Who’d have thought an inanimate object could teach a lesson in economics? Yet that’s exactly what a first-aid kit did. Several kits, actually, wall-mounted cabinets in the buildings where I work. Now we’re not just talking Band-Aids and iodine here....
Last week’s announcement that the federal budget deficit will reach $455 billion this fiscal year (which ends on Sept. 30) brought predictable denunciations from the Democratic side of the aisle. It’s not so much that Democrats care about deficits —...
The following text is the June 10th oral testimony of CAC Chairman Nicholas Provenzo before the District of Columbia Council Committee on Consumer and Regulatory Affairs regarding The Physicians Joint Negotiating Act of 2003. Madam chairman, members of the committee,...
Zoning proponents have presented zoning as the solution to many of the “problems” confronting Houston. At a time when the nation, and indeed much of the world, is rejecting government programs as the solution, zoning advocates endorse a massive government...
Disagreement with the world’s environmentalist wackos doesn’t mean that one is for dirty air and water, against conservation and for species extinction. Dr. Richard Stroup, Montana State University professor of economics and senior associate of the Center...
In the months since the November 1993 zoning referendum, zoning advocates have launched a number of accusations against their opponents. Zoning opponents, pro-zoners said, were dishonest and unprincipled. They resorted to lies, misrepresentations and scare tactics to...
The purpose of zoning, and its sole reason for existing, is to give government control over the use of all land within the community. While the rightful owner remains responsible for that property, the government will determine how that property is used. Under zoning,...
The National Heritage Areas program is an expensive, insidious attempt by non-governmental organizations and federal agencies to impose land use controls and zoning mandates on unsuspecting local communities.
On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission plans to vote on a new set of rules for media ownership. These rules dictate how many television stations can own, as well as cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations in the same market. The FCC’s...
Back in the 1980s, a lot of best-selling books were written about how the United States should emulate Japan. Pursuing free market economics based on individual entrepreneurs was passe, so it was often said by Ronald Reagan’s critics. Instead, we should follow...
Last Friday, Mountain Health Care of Asheville, North Carolina, will close its offices for good. The 11 year-old company died not from bankruptcy or poor business judgment, but of antitrust poisoning. More accurately, the United States Department of Justice executed...
The FTC knows their actions are rationally indefensible, which is why they rely on smearing their opponents and tossing around floating abstractions like “consumer welfare” to justify what they’re doing.
A nation isn’t harmed when it imports more than it exports, which is why the trade deficit is the most dangerous statistic collected by government.
When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg first named Joel Klein to head the city’s public school system, the irony was immediately apparent: an antitrust lawyer heading one of the nation’s most infamous (and ineffectual) monopolies. Last month, however,...
On Tuesday, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning Washington think tank, published a full-page ad in The New York Times condemning the proposed Bush tax cuts. This pro-tax statement is signed by more than 400 economists, including 10 Nobel laureates...
This Monday President Bush proposed a $2.2 trillion federal budget to Congress. Momentarily setting aside the sheer outrage over the destruction of such vast wealth in the pursuit of unconstitutional government programs, two items are of particular interest to those...
Upset with President Bush’s tax cut plan, columnist Molly Ivins warns that America’s more well-to-do taxpayers might go out and doing something unproductive if the government seizes a smaller portion of their incomes. “There’s no...
A battle is looming in London as three companies prepare to vie for control of Safeway PLC, a major British supermarket chain unrelated to the U.S. company of the same name. Last week, Safeway agreed to a $4.6 billion buyout from William Morrison Supermarkets. That...
The familiar chorus of “tax cuts for the rich” has begun to ring out across the political landscape, in the wake of President Bush’s proposals to boost the economy. The time is long overdue to expose some of the fallacies folded up inside that...
Last Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in the case of George Washington University v. District of Columbia, upholding the District’s zoning restrictions on GW’s land use. The case was by no means a landmark...
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