Myth: The Great Recession was caused by free-market policies that led to irrational risk taking on Wall Street. Reality: The Great Recession could not have happened without the vast web of government subsidies and controls that distorted financial markets.
The Myth: New Deal regulation of the financial system made the system safer. The Reality: New Deal regulation of the financial system failed to address the real source of the problems that led to the Great Depression and laid the foundation for future crises.
For months, various newspapers have been trying to associate Donald Trump and his administration with Ayn Rand and her philosophy. Learn Liberty just published Steve Simpson’s all-new essay titled “Crony-In-Chief: Donald Trump Epitomizes Ayn Rand's ‘Aristocracy of Pull,’” in which he not only sets the record straight, but he also offers a radical solution to “cronyism.”
The Myth: We tried free banking and the result was constant bank runs and panics. The Federal Reserve was created to make the system stable and it succeeded. The Reality: America’s recurrent panics were the product of financial control, and there is no evidence the Federal Reserve has made things better.
Now that Trump is in office there is talk that his administration will support repealing or revising Dodd-Frank — the government’s regulatory response to the financial crisis of 2008. The bill was sold as a way to protect ourselves from future crises by making the financial system more stable.
On March 2, 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case challenging a Texas law regulating access to abortion. Unlike the kind of abortion laws that were struck down in Roe v. Wade, which outlawed abortion directly, this case challenges a law that indirectly restricts access to abortions by going after doctors and clinics.
The consensus among pundits about the Democratic presidential debate is that Hillary Clinton “won” in the sense that she came across as trustworthy, likable, and “presidential.” I’ll leave to readers to ponder the use of words like these to describe someone who has been dissembling about her emails for years now and who angrily dismissed a Congressional investigation into the cause of the Benghazi attacks with “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Last Friday, Yaron broadcasted live from CPAC, the largest annual conference for conservatives in America. In addition to giving his take on all the happenings at the conference, Yaron interviewed the following guests: Ambassador John R. Bolton; Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform; Adam Mossoff of the Center for Protection of Intellectual Property; Peter Schwartz, author of the forthcoming In Defense of Selfishness; Larry Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center and an expert on net neutrality.
Not too long ago, Steven Greenhut wrote an unusually good piece for U-T San Diego, criticizing employers in California’s construction industry for lobbying for a regulatory crack down on its lower-cost competition. He correctly points out the futility of their approach: “[B]y lobbying for new rules on others rather than for less red tape for everyone, they have lost any right to seriously complain about any additional regulations future Legislatures impose on them.”
A new study by Nicole Craig and Mark Craig, professors of economics at Lafayette University, estimates that the cost of federal regulations is $2 trillion. That amounts to billions of hours in compliance.
