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,...
MARKETS
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 changes...
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 Japan's...
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, Klein's tenure as...
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 guarantee," Ivins writes, "that rich...
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 phrase. The dirty little...
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 decision, yet the...
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 next...
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.”
The War on Capital — Not Terrorism
Just as they’ve blurred the distinction between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion, OECD officials have tried to blur the distinction between money-laundering and tax havens — even though the latter involves moving illegally-gained money above-ground, from the “underground economy” while tax avoidance involves legally moving legally-made money to jurisdictions with the lowest tax rates.
Alan Greenspan: Ayn Rand’s Failed Student
As legend has it, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was once a member of Ayn Rand's 1960's salon. He was an invited guest at Rand's apartment and apparently was close enough to have read her epic Atlas Shrugged as it came off her typewriter. How lucky for him....
“Open Space” = Housing Ban
A black man waiting at a bus stop called to me as I was bicycling down the street: "You're the first black man I have seen over here in a long time." "It will be a long time before you see the next one," I said, and we both laughed. In a deeper sense, it was not...
A Letter to the Department of Justice Concerning the Microsoft Antitrust Case
I'm writing to oppose the antitrust case against Microsoft. Antitrust contradicts the free enterprise system and is a violation of the rights of business owners, their stockholders and consumers. No one is or ever has been forced to buy Microsoft products. And no one...
WorldCom as Piker: Profit Inflation by the U.S. Government
News reports now indicate that WorldCom's overstatement of its profits in the last few years may exceed the $3.8 billion initially reported, perhaps by as much as an additional $3.3 billion, maybe even more. But whatever the ultimate figure may be—$7.1 billion or even...
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