Monthly Archives: September 2012

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Inputs and Outcomes

The result of all this activity by both the public and private sectors – shifting, diffusing, equalizing, concealing, shuffling, smoothing, evading, relegating, and collectivizing the real risks and costs of economic  change- is to desensitize the economy.  It no longer

Read More

A Holocaust of Knowledge

The greatest damage inflicted by state systems of redistribution is not the “distortion of markets,” the “misallocation of resources,” or the “discoordination” of producers and consumers, but the deflation of capitalist energy, the repression of entrepreneurial ideas, and the stultification

Read More

Free Alan Gross

A few years ago I was on a trip with the United Jewish Communities to Cuba.  Our objective was to lend support to the few remaining synagogues in Havana.  We also visited the Jewish center which was a tiny open

Read More

Koch on Cronyism

In the Wall Street Journal online, (may require paid subscription), Charles G. Koch: Corporate Cronyism Harms America  When businesses feed at the federal trough, they threaten public support for business and free markets. 9/9/12 Excerpt: Only societies with a system

Read More

An Atrophy of Enterprise

The early years of the twenty-first century saw what might be termed a hypertrophy of finance and an atrophy of enterprise.  Why did 30 percent of the economy’s profits during the mid-2000s come not from the positive-sum benisons of productive

Read More

Is Debt Really the Problem?

With a record growth of the debt, it has become a central topic of the campaign.  The Republicans prominently displayed a ticking debt clock at their convention to remind voters of the debt crisis looming.  Their focus is misguided. Debt

Read More

Political Substitutes for Thought

Well, the Wahhabis want to kill all the gays and Jews.  The Sufis don’t want to kill any gays or Jews.  So the moderate, sensible position must be to kill just the gays, but not the Jews.  Or maybe the

Read More

Tax Lessons Unlearned

Thomas Sowell writes ‘Bait and Switch’ Taxes in The American Spectator, 9/5/12 excerpt: The Constitution of the United States had to be amended in 1913 to permit the federal government to collect income taxes. Almost immediately, very high tax rates

Read More

Dimensions of Wealth

As societies become wealthy Progressives believed, welfarist (or even socialist) policies would gain ever more popular support. To the dismay of (Richard) Titmuss’s followers, however, something very close to the opposite occurred. In liberal societies across the world, wealth made

Read More

Just Put Everybody on Food Stamps

The Wall Street Journal Editors write in the 9/5/12 edition, Food Stamp Nation (may require subscription which is highly recommended) Excerpts: …the Department of Agriculture report, released on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, that 46,670,373 Americans are now on food stamps.

Read More

Dependent On Our Demons

The Facebook Deficit, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, is an example of the problem with depending on the wealthy to finance the redistributionist state. Who’s the biggest loser in the Facebook stock meltdown? Next to founder Mark Zuckerberg

Read More

Can Capitalism and Democratic Socialism Coexist ?

Janet Daley write in The Telegraph (British) The myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished. Excerpt: Whatever the outcome of the American presidential election, one thing is certain: the fighting of it will be the most

Read More

Capitalist and Government Roles

American Thinker published my retort to Hedrick Smith’s New York Times article of 9/2/12,  When Capitalists Cared. My article, When Government Allowed Capitalists to Care, noted the several false assumptions in Smith’s NYT article. Excerpt: America was able to expand

Read More

Outside The Bubble

Daniel Greenfield writes in his blog, Sultan Knish, Everything is Fake, 8/28/12 Excerpts: It’s a lie, but knowing a lie for what it is requires either being able to do the math or have the common sense to know it

Read More