11/13/2010 – Chuck Rogér -

President Obama called the Democrats’ November 2 loss of sixty-one House seats a “shellacking.” Yet in a day-after press conference, Obama sported a self-absorbed manner, contrived reflection, and a basic misread of the American people. In a “60 Minutes” interview aired four days later, he denied that voters had repudiated his agenda. The president doesn’t understand why a center-right nation would reject a left-wing Obama. This man will not “move to the center.”

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. In early 2008, Senator Obama accused businesses of having cultures “rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed.” Only ten months shy of establishing a federal regime rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and greed, the senator also warned that America’s “real problem is … that the corporation you work for will ship [your job] overseas for nothing more than a profit.” more »

8/25/2010 – Michael Strong -

University faculties are often ignorant of the fact of entrepreneurial value creation. One such faculty member is the influential human rights scholar Judith Blau, Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Through her membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Human Rights Coalition she defines the human rights agenda for the world’s largest and most prestigious scientific association. Through her leadership of Sociologists Without Borders she promotes an activist “public sociology” agenda internationally. She has published dozens of articles and more than a dozen books, and she has served on numerous professional committees, advisory boards, editorial boards, etc. more »

8/19/2010 – Chris Banescu –

America’s economic situation needs an emergency heart transplant, but Obama and the Democrats keep offering band-aids instead. We need a major change in government economic, tax, and fiscal policies not more government bailouts. Yet the president is doing nothing to reverse the enormous uncertainty fostered by his own administration’s aggressive anti-business and pro high-tax initiatives and rhetoric.

In the latest indication that our president has no clue why businesses are struggling and unwilling to hire, Obama is trying to force through another $30 billion government bailout program to “help banks boost lending to small businesses.” Unfortunately, it’s not the lack of available funds that are stopping businesses from expanding and generating new jobs. It’s the massive economic uncertainty and instability created by misguided government mandates (especially the oppressive regulations of ObamaCare), coupled with the massive tax increases coming in January 2011, that have spooked companies and forced them into defensive economic positions. more »

8/16/2010 – Henry Oliner -

John Galt is the mysterious hero lurking in the background in Ayn Rand’s infamous novel, Atlas Shrugged. He is the industrialist who went into hiding and led a strike of producers fed up with the physical and moral encroachment from a government of moral supremacists who rationalized theft with childish notions of fairness but no conception of the actual production of wealth. That synopsis should also explain why Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, is having a very strong resurgence in popularity.

I meet with two different groups of independent business owners focused in the southeast and their perception of current business conditions is almost unanimous. They are angry. They face conflicting and unclear regulations, and a near certainty of increasing taxes . They are impatient. Many are not profitable and are unable and unwilling to tolerate customers who cannot pay, employees who do not think, banks without judgment, and a government that despises their efforts to create wealth and jobs. more »

8/1/2010 – Jon N. Hall -
Certain ideas get so firmly fixed in some folks’ brains that no amount of evidence can dislodge them. Such ideas become articles of faith. And one article of faith that is particularly deeply stuck in the minds of “the faithful” is that Reaganomics doesn’t work.

The big idea behind Reaganomics is that cutting tax rates boosts the economy, which results in more tax revenue. The history of the last three decades bears this out. more »

Steve Wynn

6/27/2010 – Chris Banescu -

In a recent interview, Steve Wynn, the successful American casino resort and real-estate developer, made some shocking observations about the unstable and aggressively anti-business atmosphere in America perpetuated by our own government. In his interview with CNBC, Steve expressed the nightmarish situation that US companies face due to the arbitrary, punitive, and misguided manner in which legislators in Washington, DC continue to endlessly tax and regulate businesses in America, while our economy continues to suffer and deteriorate.

In a criticism clearly directed at President Obama and the Democrats, Mr. Wynn focused on the key reason why America is now less stable and less business-friendly than even China: our own incompetent government in Washington! He explained how China now offers more political stability, more opportunities, and much more business-friendly environment than the United States: more »

6/9/2010 – Kim Priestap -
A survey conducted by Zogby to determine how well people of different political stripes understand economics found that progressives and liberals were woefully ignorant of even the most basic concepts of economics. Some might laugh, but this survey is more than just an academic exercise. It provides insight into why Barack Obama and the progressive Democrats in Congress continue to pass laws and implement policies that do nothing but drive down our economy and drive up unemployment. From the Wall Street Journal: more »

5/29/2010 – Chris Banescu –
The socialist policies implemented by the Obama administration and the Democrat leadership undermine America’s economic prosperity and prolong the misery for millions of companies and workers. Despite passing multi-trillion dollar government tax and spend initiatives, numerous bailouts of failed businesses, and repeated extensions of government benefits, Americans are suffering and the economy is languishing. Nationwide the unemployment rate has risen to 9.9%, while mortgage defaults and foreclosure rates have surged to record numbers.

Even with the tens of billions of dollars Congress has spent on preventing consumer mortgage defaults and home foreclosures, things have not improved much. How could they? Such government bailout measures are temporary band-aids that fail to address the structural problems our economy faces. They only delay the inevitable and push the problem further down the road. It doesn’t matter that house payments are now lower and the government has picked up the tab for a few months. If Americans cannot find a job or raise the capital to start a business they won’t have the money to pay even reduced mortgage payments. more »

5/12/2010 – Walter E. Williams -
Listening to America’s liberals, who now prefer to call themselves progressives, one would think that free markets benefit the rich and harm the poor, but little can be further from the truth. First, let’s first say what free markets are. Free markets, or laissez-faire capitalism, refer to an economic system where there is no government interference except to outlaw and prosecute fraud and coercion. It ought to be apparent that our economy cannot be described as free market because there is extensive government interference. We have what might be called a mixed economy, one with both free market and socialistic attributes. If one is poor or of modest means, where does he fare better: in the freer and more open sector of our economy or in the controlled and highly regulated sector? Let’s look at it. more »

Jacob Hornberger

5/7/2010 – Jacob Hornberger -
Liberals say that they love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged. Unfortunately, however, the economic philosophy that liberals favor constitutes a direct assault on the economic well-being of the poor, along with nearly everyone else in society.

Liberals claim to combat poverty in two principal ways.

First, they use the force of government (e.g., income taxes) to take money from those who have earned it in order to give it to the poor.

Second, they restrict people’s use of their property to enable the poor to have access to such property. more »

by Ben Stein | 4/15/2010 (1976)

Back in 1976, when Gerald Ford was President, Ben Stein, then a consultant on Washington and conservatism for the Normal Lear show All’s Fair, sent this memorandum to its creators:

What I don’t like is the way rich liberals, who have made their money through the operations of the capitalist system and who would be miserable bureaucratic cogs in a socialist system, are nevertheless socialists. I suspect that a large part of their motivation is a style of asceticism which has been fashionable among the rich since the time of the Pharisees. Another motivation for the rich liberals to dislike the capitalist system is that they have already gotten theirs and they don’t want to be challenged by other people coming along and getting theirs. more »

Minding the Campus | by John Ellis | 3/11/2010

UC Berkeley students protest

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year’s. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead.

The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought. more »

American Thinker | by Chuck Rogér | 3/8/2010

In America, we are beginning to sense a nasty reality that President Obama must acknowledge: Our worst economic problems lie ahead, and fixing those problems is going to hurt — plenty. Our federal government now runs a con game that promises people a level of financial security impossible to deliver. Honoring Medicare and Social Security obligations alone will require confiscatory taxation capable of killing off prosperity. And so it is time to cure our nanny-state insanity and get back to basics. [...]

To deal with our American disaster, experts call for our economy to be “transformed.” President Obama wants a “fundamental” transformation. But what America really needs is a transformation that would undo a century of malignant progressivism that perverted the free-market capitalism on which our nation was founded. Returning to those free-market basics will not be painless. more »

American Thinker | by Jim Gammon | 3/3/2010

We hear people speak of “business” and “capitalism” as being somehow evil, including comments about capitalists victimizing employees and customers in pursuit of the goal of “maximizing profits”.

In conversations with supposedly educated people who lean to the left, the concept is an accepted axiom, that maximizing profits – at the expense of everything good in the world – is the one and only purpose of business. It is the socialist rallying cry these days. more »

Amazon.com | by Nicole Gelinas | 2009

Robust financial markets support capitalism, they don’t imperil it. But in 2008, Washington policymakers were compelled to replace private risk-takers in the financial system with government capital so that money and credit flows wouldn’t stop, precipitating a depression.

Washington’s actions weren’t the start of government distortions in the financial industry, Nicole Gelinas writes, but the natural result of 25 years’ worth of such distortions.

In the early eighties, modern finance began to escape reasonable regulations, including the most important regulation of all, that of the marketplace. The government gradually adopted a “too big to fail” policy for the largest or most complex financial companies, saving lenders to failing firms from losses. As a result, these companies became impervious to the vital market discipline that the threat of loss provides. more »