Regulation Policy & Welfare

There Is No Such Thing as Federal Aid

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 18, 2002

85th General Assembly STATE OF INDIANA House Concurrent Resolution No. 2 INDIANA needs no guardian and intends to have none. We Hoosiers — like the people of our sister states — were fooled for quite a spell with the magician’s trick that a dollar taxed out of our pockets and sent to Washington, will be ...

The Free Market and Hawks

by Bart Frazier October 29, 2002

Rosalie Barrow Edge should be considered a hero to libertarians and conservationists alike. In 1933, she founded Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pennsylvania. At a time in our country’s history when the economy was a shambles and socialism was hip, Edge managed to establish the first refuge for hawks in ...

Capitalism, Scandal, and the Government

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 2002

Every few years voices are heard heralding and warning of a “crisis of capitalism.” The 20th century saw an unending series of such voices of doom that the free market had shown its injustice towards and exploitation of the ordinary working man or that free enterprise fostered ’merchants of death” who dragged ...

The Folly of Protecting Teens from Work

by James Bovard October 1, 2002

Protecting teenagers from work is one of the worst things you can do to kids. Some child-labor groups are campaigning to impose new restrictions on freedom of contract. While some prohibitionists might have good intentions, pervasive restrictions on youth labor would be a menace both to kids and to society. The Associated Press reported that 73 teens were killed on ...

Repeal the Corporate Tax

by Sheldon Richman September 13, 2002

Why not repeal the corporate income tax? Everyone’s worried about falling stock values, so let’s remove one of the big burdens on corporate profits: the corporate income tax. We shouldn’t do this as a short-term quick fix. The repeal should be permanent. What? you’re saying. Let those dirty corporations get ...

Homeland Security and the Bureaucratic Dilemma

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2002

On the evening of June 6, 2002, President George W. Bush delivered a brief nationwide television address in which he called for the creation of a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The president stated that “America is leading the civilized world in a titanic struggle against terror. Freedom and fear are at war. And freedom is winning.” But in ...

Protectionist Welfare for Steel

by James Bovard September 1, 2002

On March 5, President Bush announced that he was slapping high tariffs on steel imports. Bush began the announcement by declaring, “Free trade is an important engine of economic growth and a cornerstone of my economic agenda.... To open even more markets to American products, I have urged the Senate to grant me the ...

The Real Solution to Business Misconduct

by Sheldon Richman August 20, 2002

The way people talk about the need for new regulation of business, you’d think it was 1930. Have we not already lived through the New Deal with its pervasive regulation of corporations? Have we not lived through the regulatory explosions of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s? Are not the transgressions ...

Let Spontaneity Rule

by Bart Frazier August 13, 2002

As a conservationist and a libertarian, I always find it interesting to think how similar ecology and political economy are. Both are products of nature — self-sustaining phenomena resulting from the aggregate of millions of unrelated events. The Nobel-laureate economist Friedrich Hayek coined a term for ...

Leave Sam and Martha Alone

by Sheldon Richman August 12, 2002

One of the latest “business scandals” involves alleged insider trading by people close to Samuel Waksal, the founder of the drug company ImClone Systems and its recently resigned CEO. The government says Waksal told family members and friend Martha Stewart that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was about to ...

Bush’s Farm Fiasco

by James Bovard August 1, 2002

In May, President Bush signed one of the most wasteful farm bills that Congress has ever enacted. Though the estimated cost of the handouts continues rising ever closer to $200 billion over the next six years, Bush refused to squander any of his political capital protecting the American taxpayer. The hottest controversy ...

The Fall of Libertarianism or the Failure of Interventionism? A Reply to Francis Fukuyama

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2002

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA gained international recognition in 1989 when he published an article in The National Interest entitled “The End of Man.” He offered a “Hegelian” conception of the evolution and direction of human history. In short, he argued that human society was following a dialectical trajectory of development that would end with the triumph of liberal democracy around the ...