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Displaying: 1 - 32 of 496 items.
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Issue 519 An Ignored ‘Disparity’: Part II
3 February 2012, Thomas Sowell
One of the ways of trying to reduce the vast disparities in economic success, which are common in countries around the world, is by making higher education more widely available, even for people without the money to pay for it. This can be both a generous investment and a wise investment for a society to make. But, depending on how it is done, it can also be a foolish and even dangerous investment, as many societies around the world have learned the hard way.
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Issue 518 I Love Greed
31 January 2012, Walter E Williams
What human motivation gets the most wonderful things done? It's really a silly question, because the answer is so simple. It turns out that it's human greed that gets the most wonderful things done. When I say greed, I am not talking about fraud, theft, dishonesty, lobbying for special privileges from government or other forms of despicable behaviour. I'm talking about people trying to get as much as they can for themselves. Let's look at it.
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Issue 517 An Ignored 'Disparity'
25 January 2012, Thomas Sowell
With all the talk about "disparities" in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention -- disparities in the ability to create wealth. People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, which are often the reasons for the disparities in income.
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Issue 516 A Wild Forecast for Euro Pain
24 January 2012, Oliver Marc Hartwich
Revisiting my predictions for Europe in 2011 (Don’t believe this forecast, December 23, 2010), I can today declare without any false modesty that I was right on the money. Not only that 2011 has been very much like 2010. It is also emerging that we will celebrate Christmas on December 25 this year – just as I had forecast last December.
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Issue 515 In Private Enterprise We Trust
18 January 2012, Richard A Epstein
The persistently fragile economic situation confronting the United States, Europe, and now perhaps Asia presents a grave challenge on how to best reverse the current trend of stagnation through the introduction of sound regulatory and business policies. In dealing with this issue, it is imperative to recognize that the proper response to short-term boom or bust cycles depends on developing those policies and practices that prove sustainable in the long run.
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Issue 514 Rising Credulity
21 December 2011, Nils-Axel Mörner
It has now become traditional for climate change summits to open with a new, dazzling prediction of impending catastrophe. The UN Climate Conference under way in the South African coastal town of Durban is no exception. This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming.
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Issue 513 Curing the Unemployment Blues
19 December 2011, Richard A Epstein
One of the enduring faiths of modern progressive thought is that omniscient policy makers can cancel out the errors of one form of economic intervention by implementing a second. That lesson was brought home to me when I was a third year student at Yale Law School, whenever discussion turned to the perennial debate over the minimum wage.
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Issue 512 Sending Profits Abroad is a Good Thing
14 December 2011, Oliver Marc Hartwich
On Sunday, Senator Bob Brown was interviewed on ABC 1's Insiders program. The Greens leader admitted that putting a price on carbon would ultimately mean shutting down the coal industry. But never mind, Brown explained. Since the big mining companies were largely 'foreign-owned, multinational corporations,' their profits would only 'line the pockets of millionaires elsewhere in the world.'
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Issue 511 Nothing New on the Euro Front
13 December 2011, Wolfgang Kasper
Most people around the world—laymen and seasoned investors alike—seem confused and bemused by the unfolding saga of the troubled Euro. Though I'm a distant observer of the Euro experiment, nothing has surprised me so far.
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Issue 510 Three Cheers for Income Inequality
8 December 2011, Richard A Epstein
Taxing the top one percent even more means less wealth and fewer jobs for the rest of us.
The 2008 election was supposed to bring to the United States a higher level of civil discourse. Fast-forward three years and exactly the opposite has happened. A stalled economy brings forth harsh recriminations. As recent polling data reveals, the American public is driven by two irreconcilable emotions. The first is a deep distrust of government, which has driven the approval rate for Congress below ten percent.
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Issue 509 Let Champagne Socialists Pay More Tax Voluntarily
6 December 2011, Janet Albrechtsen
Having reached the summit of their careers, using the free market to build businesses and earn mountains of money, employing top-end tax lawyers to ensure they pay not a cent more in tax than required, a form of rich businessman's guilt complex seems to set in with some of them.
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Issue 508 The Euro: A Man-made Disaster
1 December 2011, Michael James
In the early 1990s, while eastern Europe was emerging from the man-made disaster of communism, in western Europe the seeds of a new man-made disaster were being sown.
The euro - the European Union's common currency - was designed to draw the countries of Europe together. In practice, it is now driving them apart.
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Issue 507 Compelled to reform, unable to deliver
28 November 2011, Henry Ergas
It is not just Berlusconi financial markets have lost confidence in. It is the sistema Italia -- the complex interplay of economics, social relations and politics that characterises modern Italy.
From the ruins of fascism and war, that interplay made Italy one of Europe's most prosperous countries. But it contained the seeds of its own destruction, and unless its fundamental vices are addressed, the repeated failure of reform efforts shows today's problems will persist and worsen.
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Issue 506 Ignorance Exploited
22 November 2011, Walter E Williams
Many Wall Street occupiers are echoing the Communist Party USA's call to "Save the nation! Tax corporations! Tax the rich!" There are other Americans, on both the left and the right -- for example, President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner -- who call for reductions in corporate taxes.
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Issue 505 The Euro Crisis: Doubting the ‘Domino’ Effect
17 November 2011, Edward P Lazear
It seems everyone is worried that problems in Europe will derail our fragile recovery. For this reason, markets breathed a sigh of relief when the Europeans came up with a plan to provide yet another reprieve to Greece. The main worry, now somewhat eased, was that a Greek default would spread to countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal.
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Issue 504 A Slow-Growth America Can’t Lead the World
16 November 2011, John B Taylor
At the most recent meeting a year ago in Seoul, the G-20 rejected the president's pleas for a deficit-increasing Keynesian stimulus and instead urged credible budget-deficit reduction and a return to sound fiscal policy. And on that trip he had to defend the activist monetary policy of the Federal Reserve against widespread criticism that its easy money was damaging to emerging-market countries, causing volatile capital flows and inflationary pressures.
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Issue 503 Bailouts for Me, but Not for Thee
11 November 2011, Matt Welch
About one week before the Occupy Wall Street protests really started taking off nationwide, long-time consumer crusader and third-party perennial Ralph Nader enthused to reporter Michael Tracey that Rep. Ron Paul and the movement he spearheads represent a “foundational convergence” with the progressive left.
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Issue 502 The Shortsighted Keynesians
9 November 2011, Richard A Epstein
Last week, I participated in a debate about the Obama jobs plan. The debate, sponsored by Intelligence Squared, was on the topic, “Congress Should Pass the Obama Jobs Plan—Piece by Piece.” This was one debate in which the home-court advantage of my being a faculty member of NYU Law School served Mitchell and me naught. New York City was true to its liberal image.
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Issue 501 Obama: Campaigning Like It's 1936
7 November 2011, Merrill Matthews
While Republican presidential candidates are looking forward by proposing variations of a flat income tax, President Barack Obama’s tax-the-rich campaign strategy is looking backward—to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign. FDR won his reelection, but the American people lost.
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Issue 500 Four Nations, Four Lessons
2 November 2011, N Gregory Mankiw
AS the economy languishes, politicians and pundits are debating what to do next. When we look around the world, it’s hard to find positive role models. But as we search for answers, it is useful to keep in mind those fates that we would like to avoid.
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Issue 499 Google’s Eric Schmidt Expounds on His Senate Testimony
30 October 2011, Lillian Cunningham
A week after Google Chairman Eric Schmidt reflects on his first time testifying before Congress, what Washington understands and doesn’t understand about regulating technology, and where the connections and disconnects are between the Hill and the Valley.
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Issue 498 Wall Street and Its Protesters Are Both Addicted to Government Handouts
27 October 2011, Rachel Marsden
If President Obama and Congress decided tomorrow to end American military action worldwide, create a government-funded health care system and rightfully stop bailing out Wall Street banks, would you really be satisfied? Would that solve all your problems? I doubt it.
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Issue 497 A Little Inflation Can Be a Dangerous Thing
21 October 2011, Paul Volcker
We are now beginning to hear murmurings about the possible invigorating effects of “just a little inflation.” Perhaps 4 or 5 percent a year would be just the thing to deal with the overhang of debt and encourage the “animal spirits” of business, or so the argument goes.
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Issue 496 'Stop Whining'?
19 October 2011, Thomas Sowell
If there was ever any doubt that the Democrats take the black vote for granted, that doubt should have been put to rest when Barack Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus, "Stop whining!"
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Issue 495 Stimulus Has Been a Washington Job Killer
14 October 2011, John F Coogan
Temporary, targeted tax reductions and increases in government spending are not good economics. They have repeatedly failed to increase economic growth on a sustainable basis. What may come as a surprise is that such policies are not good politics either. Their inability to deliver promised economic benefits has invariably led disappointed voters to turn against those politicians, Democratic and Republican, who have supported them.
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Political Shortcomings of MMP
14 October 2011, Roger Kerr
I would care less about the adverse economic consequences of our mixed member proportional (MMP) voting system, which were outlined in my last article, if they reflected the genuine democratic preferences of New Zealanders. They are unlikely to do so, however, because of the constitutional and political weaknesses of MMP.
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Issue 494 There Will Be Oil
12 October 2011, Daniel Yergin
Since the beginning of the 21st century, a fear has come to pervade the prospects for oil, fueling anxieties about the stability of global energy supplies. It has been stoked by rising prices and growing demand, especially as the people of China and other emerging economies have taken to the road. This specter goes by the name of "peak oil."
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Issue 493 Two Different Worlds: Part 2
10 October 2011, Thomas Sowell
A few weeks ago, I had what seemed to me a small medical problem, so I phoned my primary physician. However, after we discussed the problem, he directed me to a specialist. No more than 5 hours elapsed between my seeing the first specialist and the time when I was on an operating table.
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Issue 492 Two Different Worlds
5 October 2011, Thomas Sowell
Ideological clashes over particular laws, policies and programs often go far deeper. Those with opposing views of what is desirable for the future also tend to differ equally sharply as to what the reality of the present is. In other words, they envision two very different worlds.
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Issue 491 The Obama-Buffett Siren Call
3 October 2011, Richard A Epstein
Mr. Buffett and the president are not alone in their determined inability to understand how economic systems work. In the past several weeks, I have been peppered with pointed criticism insisting that any concern with the effect of marginal rates of taxation on high-income earners is overwrought.
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Issue 490 End the Fed's Dual Mandate and Focus on Prices
30 September 2011, John B Taylor
Some worry that a single focus on the goal of price stability would lead to more unemployment. But history shows just the opposite. A single mandate wouldn't stop the Fed from providing liquidity, or serving as lender of last resort, or reducing the interest rate in a financial crisis or a recession. But it would make it more difficult for the Fed to engage in the kinds of discretionary actions that frequently have resulted in higher unemployment.
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Issue 489 The New Civil Rights Leaders
26 September 2011, Rishawn Biddle
These days, civil rights leadership can be claimed by folks such as Geoffrey Canada, Dr. Steve Perry, and Gwen Samuel. Each one is taking on the biggest concern among black families - and families throughout the nation overall - in this century: the reform of America's lackluster traditional public schools.
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