Work Sharing seems to be the “in” thing. According to its advocates, unemployment is caused by people working too many hours; if they would just reduce their workweek to, say 32 hours, there would be plenty of jobs to go around for everyone. The latest politician to make this proposal is Bob...

Universality and selectivity are amenable to a rather straightforward and non-value-laden definition. For our purposes, universality may be described as pertaining to aid programs where the benefits go to all persons, regardless of income. The amount of the benefits, moreover, is invariant with...

I have been asked to address the question of the welfare state. In my view, the ideal situation would be one where we had no welfare state at all. Welfare is demeaning to recipients, it creates dependency, and it reduces self-reliance. Further, it is morally suspect because the money used is...

Public finance is the sub-discipline of economics that deals with taxes, fiscal policy and government enterprise in general. In order to assess the case in behalf of taxation commonly made in this field, I shall analyze the public finance textbooks of ATKINSON and STIGLITZ (1980), DUE [1963],...

In virtually all economic sub-disciplines, practitioners of the dismal science are exceedingly desirous of avoiding normative concerns, at least in principle. These are seen, and rightly so, as extremely treacherous. Being only human, they do sometimes stray off the path of positive analysis;...

This paper posits that the government is indistinguishable from a robber gang except for the fact that it enjoys exceedingly good public relations (supplied to it, symbiotically, by the intellectual classes) and thus legitimacy. The paper attempts to see beyond this superficiality. and thus to...

The present paper attempts to trace out the implications of the libertarian philosophy for the proper relationship between an inhabitant of a country, and its unjust government. Part I of this paper includes section 2, in which the stage is set for answering this challenging question, section 3,...

At first glance, there is good and sufficient reason to criticize any attempt to link Ayn Rand and Austrian economics, such as is attempted in the present collection of essays. After all, the school of thought founded by this novelist and philosopher is non-controversially called "Objectivism,"...

Richard Wagner (2000) is an attack on the Austrian business cycle (ABC) theory. Although I shall be defending the latter against the former, I welcome Wagner’s contribution to the debate on the Austrian theory of the business cycle. It provides a good background review, and provides us with an...

Cowen (1997) criticizes Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) on eight grounds: 1. systematic errors; 2. inflation volatility; 3. confusion of inflation and savings; 4. confusion of inflation and investment; 5. real vs. nominal rates of interest; 6. interest rate information; 7. investor...