Simon Johnson, former chief economist with the International Monetary Fund and currently an MIT professor of entrepreneurship, has been arguing for the forced downsizing of Wall Street’s biggest banks for well over a year. In May 2009 he fiercely criticized what he described as the country’s “financial oligarchy” for creating the 2008 crisis and subsequently […]
Given that our country is mired in a severe recession, the history of the Great Depression — especially the history of how we got out of it — is rightly regarded as relevant to fixing today’s problems. Some popular accounts would have us believe that the Great Depression ended via a) FDR’s New Deal and/or […]
Government monopolies cause food shortages and shopping frenzies in Venezuela.
“Regulated markets work best.” The words are coming from Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. After all, “we have traffic lights too,” he argued on Fox Business this Monday. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was set up as an independent government agency in the 1970s with the stated goal of protecting […]
Old Europe is in something of an identity crisis. The specter of European federalism coupled with a widespread unease about Muslim immigration has many Europeans wondering about their nationhood and what it means to be “European” anyway. The financial meltdown and subsequent recession further fractured an already fragile self-image. Foreign immigration and decades of post-colonial […]
Those who advocate for government controls in medicine cry, “People, not profits.” They say profits are unacceptable in medicine because our health is so important. But it is precisely because our health is so important that profits must be vigorously defended. If quality health care disappears for Americans, it will have been killed by the […]
The treasury secretary misdiagnoses the financial crisis and offers the wrong solutions.
Change has come to America with the passing of health-care reform earlier this week. The bill has been one of the most divise in recent political history, leaving the left ecstatic and the right in a state of distress. In an article for The New York Times, representing the left, is David Leonhardt, praising the […]
The Parti socialiste won France’s second round of regional elections conclusively this Sunday, gathering over half the votes nationwide while President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives trailed in second place with just a third of the electorate. The socialists already controlled twenty out of France’s 22 departments in Europe, gaining the island of Corsica this weekend. The […]
Writing for The Huffington Post about the American health insurance industry, Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wonder, “Why is too much not enough?” Living in these United States, there comes a point at which you throw your hands up in exasperation and despair and ask a fundamental question or two: how much excess profit does […]
Spain is the last major economy of Europe still mired in recession as its government remained committed to socialist doctrine throughout 2009. Massive deficit spending has only worsened the country’s predicament however, forcing Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to finally start reining in Spain’s mounting debt. Last month, Professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard University […]
Step by step, Americans’ freedoms and rights are violated. Is the country on a road to serfdom?
The reaction to one senator’s temporary block of a welfare bill shows what the welfare state has done to America.
In an article entitled “We The Problem,” Evan Thomas, editor at Newsweek, is trying to establish what’s wrong with his country. The problem isn’t the political system, he writes. “It’s us.” For decades now, Americans have lived “as if there is no tomorrow,” according to Thomas. “They have racked up personal debt, spending more than […]
Since the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom published by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal warned that, “Government interventions in financial markets and the automotive sector have raised concerns about expropriation and violation of the contractual rights of shareholders and bondholders” in the United States, it is prudent to explore the necessity […]
