The United States Forest Service: The World’s Largest Socialized Road-Building Company by Michael Peterson May 1, 1993 The old joke goes that if all economists were laid end to end, they still couldn't reach a conclusion. However, if you did the same to all the roads the Forest Service plans to build and reconstruct by 2030, you would reach the conclusion that such activity is ludicrous, and you would travel to the moon and back and ...
Book Review: Welfare Economics and Externalities in an Open Ended Universe by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 1993 Welfare Economics and Externalities in an Open Ended Universe: A Modern Austrian Perspective by Roy E. Cordato (Boston: Kluwer Academic Press, 1992); 140 pages. Classical liberals and libertarians have traditionally argued that government should be limited to certain essential functions for the sake of social order: police protection against domestic criminals, military force for security against foreign aggression, and a court ...
Highway to Collapse: Spending on Infrastructure by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 1993 Bill Clinton believes that spending on infrastructure will bring jobs and prosperity to America — and, in the process, finally prove, after sixty years of failure, that the welfare-state, managed-economy way of life can be a success after all. But spending on infrastructure is just another highway to collapse. It will only result in higher taxes, more impoverishment, and ...
The Failure of Socialism and Lessons for America, Part 2 by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1993 Part 1 | Part 2 In the early 1920s, Ludwig von Mises pointed out that "socialism is the watchword of our day. The socialist idea dominates the modem spirit. The masses approve of it; it has set its seal upon our time. When history comes to tell our story it will write above the chapter, 'The Epoch of Socialism."' Since ...
The Importance of Tools by Karl Hess April 1, 1993 It is the pompous delusion of politicians that they significantly improve the way the world works. Nonsense. Through taxation, rules, regulations, and war, politicians historically have destroyed people's lives and obstructed their economic progress. The real work of the world — the way we live our daily lives — ...
The Great Multiplier by Henry Grady Weaver April 1, 1993 Through foresight, imagination, and individual initiative, man develops tools and facilities which expand his efforts and enable him to produce things which would not otherwise be possible. This is an outstanding difference between man and animal, just as it is an outstanding difference between civilization and barbarism. Progress toward better living would never have been possible, except through the development ...
Book Review: Russia’s Secret Rulers by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1993 Russia's Secret Rulers: How the Government and the Criminal Mafia Exercise Their Power by Lev Timofeyev (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); 177 pages; $21.00. The Soviet Union was a harsh taskmaster for those who were interested in truth and were daring enough to convey the truths they had learned. Lev Timofeyev graduated as an economist from the Moscow Institute of ...
Freedom of Education by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1993 What if, one hundred years ago, the American people had decided to amend the Constitution to provide a system of public churches in towns across America. Imagine the following conversation in 1993: Advocate of Religious Freedom: We have a terrible problem with the public-church system. It was a big mistake to set up public churching in America a hundred years ...
The Failure of Socialism and Lessons for America, Part 1 by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 1993 Part 1 | Part 2 The world is watching the spectacle of Russia and the other captive nations of the former Soviet Union trying to free themselves from their seventy-five-year experiment in socialism. The bankruptcy of the system is accepted by practically everyone. The economies of the former Soviet republics are in shambles. Civil wars and ethnic violence have ...
Freeing the Education Market by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1993 Many a profound word is spoken unwittingly. Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office once issued a paper stating that the literacy rate in Massachusetts has never been as high as it was before compulsory schooling was instituted. Before 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to force ...
Book Review: Reinventing Politics by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 1993 Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel by Vladimir Tismaneanu (New York: The Free Press, 1992); 312 pages; $24.95. Europe lasted for more than four decades. And each of the communist regimes constructed in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania were, in its essentials, created in ...
Speculation, Law, and the Market Process by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 1993 After Hurricane Andrew devastated the southern part of Florida, the state's attorney general threatened to prosecute "price-gougers" and speculators for charging exorbitant prices for food, ice, plywood, and other essential items. The Power of government officials to regulate prices and to punish speculators is not new. It stretches back centuries. ...