The popular humor website “Cracked.com” recently published a thought provoking article entitled “5 Popular Forms of Charity (That Aren’t Helping).” The five charitable activities mentioned were (1) awareness campaigns, (2) donating clothing, (3) choosing your charity based on its overhead, (4) earmarking donations, (5) volunteering after disasters. The author’s arguments for why each of these…
In his latest New York Times blog post, MIT professor and former chief IMF economist Simon Johnson fallaciously argues that those who oppose welfare are mean-spirited and bad at economics. After reading this post, you’ll see it is actually Johnson who is the bad economist.
The main problem with unemployment benefits, or government handouts, is…
Prosperity, stability, security – these are things people generally desire. Obama did a great job alluding to these ends in his State of the Union speech a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, a disastrous problem arises when you choose the wrong means to achieve desired ends. The mistake of choosing the wrong means occurs when…
As the recession continues, economists like Laura D’Andrea Tyson, the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton, advocates spending as the pathway out of our economic banana. In her latest post on the New York Times economics blog, Tyson tells us that in order for the economy to recover we need an…
Those of us who are mature, sophisticated, and all grown up know that without government regulation we would all live in slums and be poisoned by the food we eat. Or so Huffington Post writer Carl Gibson would like you to think in his hit piece on Ron Paul’s free market ideas. In this article,…
Ron Paul’s economic philosophy and book End the Fed got some crucial publicity and thoughtful debate on Saturday. Simon Johnson, MIT economist and former IMF chief-economist, wrote in the New York Times economics blog that more people should take Dr. Paul seriously. Unfortunately he advises Dr. Paul promote some very anti-free market, and counter-productive measures.…
As krlatham pointed out yesterday, it is wonderful to see the Austrian school get a shout out in such a noted publication as The Economist. While it is true, in a sense, that all publicity is good publicity, there were some shortcomings in The Economist’s representation of Austrian theory.
The author writes that “Austrians see…
