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.
After years of rising gasoline prices, people are puzzled by the recent drop that has a gallon of gas at levels not seen in nearly four years. Typically in times of Middle East unrest, prices at the pump spike, yet, despite the violence in Iraq and Syria, gallon of gas is now at a national average of $3.
Eighty years ago, in the autumn of 1934, there appeared in English one of the most important books on money and inflation penned in the twentieth century, The Theory of Money and Creditby the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. Even eight decades later, it still offers the clearest analysis and understanding of booms and busts, inflations and depressions.
Suppose instead of making common cause with corporate titans and Washington technocrats to impose Common Core standards uniformly on education, philanthropist Bill Gates instead used his vast wealth to create his own brand of schools to compete in a vibrant educational marketplace.
Featured · Government · Internet/Telecom · Politics · Taxes
This morning the House Judiciary Committee will undertake the markup of the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act. The Act would protect consumers from the increased costs in accessing and using the Internet by permanently extending the moratorium on Internet access taxes, and would prevent multiple and discriminatory taxation of Internet sales.
Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting inflations have often undermined the social fabric, ruined the economy, and sometimes brought revolution and tyranny in their wake. The political economy of the French Revolution is a tragic example of this.
Featured · Internet/Telecom · Regulation
NetCompetition, an organization dedicated to improving competitiveness in the internet market, held a panel discussion and debate on April 4th on the topic “Thinking and Starting Anew: Modernizing Communications Law for American Consumers.” Scott Cleland, Heartland Institute policy advisor and president of the Precursor consultancy firm, was the first of the five guests to speak.
A new book by French economist Thomas Piketty on “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has recently caused a major stir on the opinion pages of newspapers and magazines. Piketty has resurrected from the ash heap of history Karl Marx’s claim that capitalism inescapably leads to a worsening unequal distribution of wealth with dangerous consequences for human society.
The net neutrality movement is positioning to influence the FCC, Congress, and candidates in the mid-term election cycle, to support their version of net neutrality — i.e. FCC reclassification of broadband Internet service as a telephone common carrier service.
Net neutrality activists’ latest rhetoric that opposes the FCC’s court-required update of its Open Internet rules, by implying that there haven’t been “slow and fast lanes” on the Internet before, is obviously factually wrong and misleading, both for consumers receiving content and for entities sending content.
Economics · Government · Politics
Minimum wage has become a contentious political issue, even though it has nothing to do with a living wage. Workers are paid for the worth of the job they are paid to do. Nevertheless, Democrats plan to tap into what they perceive as income inequality by using minimum wage as a plank in their populist economic platform heading into the November elections.
The term “Greater New York” was applied, unofficially, to the 1898 consolidation that produced the present city of New York, which brought together the present five boroughs (counties). When consolidated, much of the city of New York was agricultural. As time went on, the term “Greater” came to apply to virtually any large city and its environs, not just New York. By 2010, Greater New York had expanded to somewhere between 19 million and 23 million residents, depending on the definition.
Environment/Energy · Featured · Politics · Regulation
When it comes to the Farm Bill, we’ve been doing what hurts for fifty-plus years. Let’s not do that anymore.
NEWS: The Heartlander
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