MARKETS

How Labor Unions Can Be Anti-Labor

To anyone who understands the role of the productivity of labor in raising real wages, it should be obvious that the unions’ policy of combating the rise in the productivity of labor renders them in fact a leading enemy of the rise in real wages.

Deflation

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 or volume of spending in the economic system.

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. No, these babies...

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 -- after all, they...

Antitrust, Politics and the Media

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.

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...

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 --...

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...

Economics vs. Politics

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’

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...

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...

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