Sympathy and justice are wonderful. But neither is furthered by the "living wage" movement, writes John Egger. A university shouldn't put its workers on its own welfare system. To respect their dignity we must pay them what they earn, and that can be established only on the market.
It is debatable whether Bush should be intervening in the admission standards of one Michigan College. But it is perfectly apparent that he should do something to restore a free market in labor in his own neck of the woods. As might be expected, Bush intervenes where he either can't or should not, but doesn't intervene to restore freedom where he can and should.
Do deficits cause interest rates to be higher than they otherwise would be? Supply Siders, armed with historical data, say no. Unfortunately for them, writes Christopher Mayer, the conventional wisdom is closer to the truth. Deficits crowd out private investment, fritter away savings, and rob the public of valuable capital.
To the extent additional safety comes at a higher cost, it restricts the ability to make provision for other needs and wants, including safety, in other areas of life, writes George Reisman. And this remains true even when the higher costs of safety are initially imposed on business firms rather than directly on consumers.
The cry of the Wall Street reformer is always the same: Let's have more regulators and regulations to correct the problem of prior regulators and regulations! Gregory Bresiger reviews Arthur Levitt's new book.
The Spitzer settlement is a travesty of justice. If it is true that individuals in the securities industry perpetrated fraud in order to garner investment banking fees, they should be criminally prosecuted and punished. Only a corrupt politician would ignore possible crimes in return for an industry’s support in future political campaigns. The liberal New York democrat helped himself, not investors.
Many of the most interesting issues in economics derive from a lesser-known category of alleged market failure: so-called asymmetric information. The problem of asymmetric information is simple. Different people know different things about economic goods. However, rather than indicting a need for government intervention, asymmetries in information make the free operation of markets all the more important.
Critics of Austrian theory maintain that there is no justification for the notion that businessmen should fall prey again and again to an artificial lowering of interest rates. Businessmen are likely to learn from experience, the critics argue, and not fall into the trap produced by an artificial lowering of interest rates. Frank Shostak responds.
In 1902, writes George Leef, those who aspired to enter the legal profession could take several different routes. One was simply to study law individually. A second route was to apprentice yourself into a law firm and learn what you needed to know in that environment--as Clarence Darrow did. The third option was to go to law school.
Why are Maine farmers dumping milk? The way to respond to falling prices, writes Robbie Blevins, is to offer a better product more efficiently. The signal of the need to do so is a feature of free enterprise, the system in which the consumer—which is to say, the common person—is king.
