One of the great myths about the capitalist system is the presumption that businessmen make profits at the expense of the consumers and workers in society. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Mythological trolls — described as old and ugly creatures living under bridges or in caves — are known for one central feature: generally troublesome and injurious to human enterprise. Much of the same can be said for today’s patent troll — the dubious business entity again drawing the ire of Congress that exists solely to acquire patents and make claims of infringement in court.
Budgets/Taxes · Economics · Featured · Government
Hershey’s – the Candy Man – is a BIG business. Its May 2014 market cap was $23.26 billion.
And Hershey’s is very generous with government. Through the second quarter of last year, it had spent $8,332,000 on lobbying and $845,534 on candidates and elected officials. Tallies no Mom & Pop Candy Shoppe can come close to matching.
Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow John Berlau joins The Heartland Institute’s Budget & Tax News managing editor Jesse Hathaway to talk about the U.S. Treasury Department’s recent announcement that the “auto bailout” portion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) had officially ended with the final repayment of taxpayer-funded loans to Ally Financial, formerly known as GMAC.
Economics · Featured · Politics
John Stossel spoke of being trained as a liberal consumer reporter. Believing rules were needed because life was complex, Stossel whole heartedly endorsed regulations, only to watch them fail. As to the The Department of Consumer Affairs, Stossel spoke about licensing requirement for repair shops. Licensing, however, didn’t protect customers. 30 years later repair shops, despite being licensed, were still fooling consumers and not giving consumers what they were promised to expect.
Featured · Health Care · Podcast
Research Fellow Sean Parnell talks with Jeff Anderson, Executive Director of the 2017 Project. The two discuss Anderson’s organization’s plan for replacing Obamacare with a more market-friendly system. The 2017 project is based on a combination of tax credits, reform of the individual insurance market, and high-risk pools.
Only one week after Election Day, Washington, DC’s focus has shifted from furious campaigning to National Education Week and the Thought Leader Summit (held from Nov. 10–13), “a gathering of the leaders from education, business, and government who define and shape trends in public and private education.”
After a sweeping Republican win in the 2014 midterms, some at The Heartland Institute are reluctant to take a sigh of relief. With the Republican party in firm control of congress, many new challenges and concerns face those who advocate limited government.
Over a scholarly career that has spanned a half a century, Kirzner has enriched our understanding of the theory of the competitive process, the role of the entrepreneur in bringing about market coordination and innovation, the nature of capital and interest, the dangers resulting from the regulated economy, and the importance of individual freedom for the open-ended creativity that enhances the general human condition.
Suppose that there was a button in front of you that if you pushed it would, in one instant, abolish all the governmental controls and regulations on the U.S. economy. Would you push that button, and transform America into a society of free men associating with each other on the basis of voluntary exchange, with government limited to protection of life, liberty and honestly acquired property?
Last week the Center for American Progress released a health care reform plan it claimed should draw bipartisan support because it includes Republican ideas. The first four words of an Associated Press article reporting on the plan were “Borrowing a Republican idea.”
Forty years ago, on October 9, 1974, the Nobel Prize committee announced that the co-recipient of that year’s award for economics was the Austrian economist, Friedrich A. Hayek. Never was there a more deserving recognition for one of the truly great free market thinkers of modern times.
Perhaps lost in the incessant, rolling bad news shuffle that is the Barack Obama Administration are the ongoing Hong Kong protests of rising Chinese domestic interference.
Writing in The Orange County Register, the distinguished urbanologist Joel Kotkin notes that many conservatives are now “waging a war on middle-class America” through their support for trendy progressive “smart growth” policies. Such policies are the stock in trade of an urban planning movement that has been in power for about a quarter-century now, promoted by certain business interests (aka rent-seekers) in a coalition with elitist progressive politicians and upper-class and aspiring-upper-class cultural snobs.
Apple Corp. last night announced that it is implementing a new security protocol that will make it impossible for the firm to turn over users’ personal information to government agencies, or anyone else. This is great news for users of Apple products, and one hopes that the other major phone and tablet operating system providers—notably, Google and Microsoft—will quickly follow suit.
Economics · Featured · Government
One of the great fallacies arrogantly believed in by those in political power is the notion that they can know enough to manage and command the lives of everyone in society with better results than if people are left to live their own lives as they freely choose.
Featured · Government · Politics
The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has laid bare the woeful state of European defense. For decades Europe has been reliant on an American security blanket, one that has put Europe’s various defense departments to sleep. Putin’s recent belligerence has given them a loud wake-up call. What they will do about the aggression on their frontier remains to be seen.
Economics · Government · Liberty · Taxes
Political rhetoric in the United States, particularly on the right, has a strong tendency to focus on the incomparable economic freedom of Americans and American businesses. They portray the rest of the world as more socialistic and the American system as the closest thing to a free market economy operating in the world. Yet that is far from the truth. In fact, America is swiftly being supplanted as a preferred place of business by many other countries in the rich world.
Featured · Government · Politics · Science · Uncategorized
Penn Jillette, the world-famous magician (and fellow of the Cato Institute), has a saying: “Everybody got a gris-gris.” By that, Jillette means everyone has some irrational belief or superstition, something one believes even when knowing it is an unreasonable. We carry these superstitions through life like talismans, and we defend them when confronted with the cold light of reason. My gris-gris is NASA.
Economics · Featured · Government · Politics
In yet another uninspiring performance by our unengaged and unengaging president, this time a press conference at the end of a three-day U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C., Barack Obama discussed, among other things, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas which, according to The One, “we” have achieved.
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