FreedomWorks’ CEO Matt Kibbe’s new book Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff was the topic of discussion Tuesday at Heartland Institute, and due to flight delays and re-direction the author himself had to reschedule his presentation for Wednesday. However, having read Kibbe’s book Joe Bast, CEO of the Heartland Institute, and Jim Lakely, ably filled in for Kibbe’s absence in a discussion about liberty.
Economics · Featured · FIRE · Regulation
The banking crisis of 2008 and its attendant deep recession have been hailed by statists the world over as the ultimate demonstration of capitalist greed and a justification for more and more regulation and government control of the economy, particularly the financial sector. Their argument boils down to an accusation that private actors in the marketplace are incapable of dealing with systemic crises and that government is the only agent that can address the market as a whole in order to combat panics and economic shocks. That argument won out in the aftermath of the recession, leading to a raft of new regulations, most notably the voluminous Dodd-Frank Act.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured
Instead of deregulation to reduce unnecessary, stifling regulatory burdens and barriers, as both Carter and Reagan did to such fully documented success, Obama regulates mercilessly as if regulation is cost free to the economy, as the most interventionist President in American history.
Featured · Government · Liberty · Podcast
This weekly podcast features the second half of a conversation between Jim Lakely, Heartland’s communications director, and Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute. In this half of the interview, Jim and Dr. Brook discuss President Obama’s treatment of capitalism, corporate cronyism, and the morality of libertarianism.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · FIRE
The full bill for Obama’s failed economic policies has yet to arrive. But no such explosion of debt has ever escaped a day of reckoning, and no such monetary surge has ever had a happy ending.
A truly free market economy is one that tends to have the “good deflation,” and we should look forward to it.
Economics · Featured · Government · Politics · Regulation
Transparency, therefore, has little to do with being accountable to the political branches of government. It’s about allaying the concerns of the financial market in the face of accommodative monetary policy.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · Liberty · Regulation
The Department of Labor (DoL) just implemented another crippling regulation on American businesses. All 171,000 federal contractors must now meet a seven percent hiring quota for the disabled. This quota[...]
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · Politics · Regulation
President Obama is going to hit his perpetual campaign trail to tell Americans that the economy is turning around and that his policies of the first four years have worked. They have not.
David Stockman, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, has written something either very right or very wrong, based on the scorn he has been receiving from people[...]
Central banks bought 534.6 tons of gold during 2012, the largest amount in 48 years. Interest is clearly growing in gold as an international monetary asset as more countries have[...]
Auditing the Fed, replacing Fed monetary policy discretion with a mandatory price rule governing policy, even the gold standard, Nobel Laureate Friedreich Hayek pushed the envelope beyond all of these.[...]
Economics · FIRE · Legal Affairs · Politics
Like Captain Renault in the 1942 movie Casablanca, I am “shocked… shocked” to find that gambling has been going on in the mortgage-backed securities business. And so, apparently, is the[...]
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Politics · Taxes
President Obama says that income taxes must be raised on the rich because they don’t pay their fair share. The indisputable facts from official government sources say otherwise. The CBO[...]
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · FIRE · Politics · Taxes
A great deal of attention is currently being paid to the fiscal cliff and a grand bargain. If the past is any indicator, under either event taxes will go up[...]
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Politics · Taxes
[First published at The American Spectator.] It seems like everyone is piling on my college friend Grover Norquist because they can’t wait to abandon the tax pledge not to raise[...]
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · FIRE · Politics · Regulation
[First posted at The American Spectator.] President Obama told a sleepwalking America in his Democrat Convention Acceptance speech: I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick or easy. I[...]
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