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.
MARKETS
Politics & Ideas: The Battle Over Ideas (Lecture 6, Part 4 of 4)
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...
Politics & Ideas: The Rise and Decline of Civilization (Lecture 6, Part 3 of 4)
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...
Politics & Ideas: The Philosophy of Interventionism (Lecture 6, Part 2 of 4)
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,...
Politics & Ideas: The Interdependence of Economics and Politics (Lecture 6, Part 1 of 4)
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...
Why Rent Control is Immoral
Rent controls don’t work, and its advocates know it.
Deflation
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 …
Economics Lesson in a Kit
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....
Deficits, Fiscal Policy, Tax Cuts, and Inflation
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 —...
Take No Half-Measures in Protecting Doctors from Antitrust
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,...
In Defense of Property Rights: The Challenge to Zoning Advocates (Part 6 of 6)
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...
Eco-nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment
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 Defense of Property Rights: The Effects of Zoning (Part 4 of 6)
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...
In Defense of Property Rights: The Nature of Zoning (Part 3 of 6)
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,...
National Heritage Areas: The Great National Land Grab
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.
Antitrust, Politics and the Media
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...
Japan’s Crippled Banking System
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...
Death by Antitrust: Mountain Health Care, R.I.P.
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...
Defending the Indefensible: Nestles-Dreyer’s Ice Cream Merger
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.
In Defense of “Trade Deficits”
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.
Educating the Monopolists: Antitrust Prosecutor Klein Works to Reduce Competition in Education
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,...
Bad Economics in One Lesson
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...
The Antitrust “Shakedown” Racket: Abolish the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act
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...
Marxist Molly Ivins Flunks Economics
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...
Price Check on Antitrust: WalMart’s Acquisition of Britain’s Safeway PLC
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...
Economics vs. Politics
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...
Zoning and the The “New” Property Rights
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...
Killed by the ‘Living Wage’
Businessmen in Santa Fe, New Mexico, are going to court to defend their most basic economic right–the ability to voluntarily negotiate wages with their employees. Last month, the Santa Fe city council voted to raise the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour over the...
The Long and Shoremen of It
Labor’s opposition to productivity improvements goes back at least to the early nineteenth-century Luddites.
Depression and Learned Helplessness
Depression has been defined as a persistent feeling of learned helplessness. For those who are depressed, this raises the questions: what do you feel helpless about, and why? What needs to change in order for you to feel less helpless? One area to work on is your...
When Your Home Is Not Your Castle
Should a random passersby be able to dictate the color of your house?
The Meaning of Jack Welch’s Cave-In
Welch’s proper answer to his critics should have been this: “I earned the benefits through decades of hard and successful work. I am proud of what I earned, and I intend to keep it.”
Subscribe for free.
Latest pro-Capitalism goodness sent weekly to your email box.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.