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Lawrence W. Reed

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CorporateWelfarevsSocialWelfare.jpg

Ending Corporate Welfare as We Know It →

May 1, 1999

Corporate welfare is one of the toughest nuts to crack in Washington. While almost everyone says he is opposed to it, Congress hasn’t done much about it.

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Comment
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The Poverty of the United Nations →

January 1, 1999

The fact is that Americans consume more because Americans produce more. 

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What is "Urban Sprawl"? →

October 1, 1998

Depicting sprawl as a “monster” or a “plague on the land” may capture headlines, but it doesn’t inform.

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Trust Not in What the Government Can Do For You →

June 1, 1998

What’s lamentable here is that some of our politicians lie, cheat, and steal. It is not lamentable that Americans lose faith in them when they do those things. It is laudable, because it is common sense being appropriately applied.

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Comment

Hayek was Right: The Worst Get to the Top →

February 1, 1998

The docile and gullible will accept a ready-made system of values, even a rotten one.

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Food for Thought and Double Standards →

January 1, 1998

Winning the war of ideas requires that we not let the other side get away with judging free markets against perfection while they judge their own deficient prescriptions against mere good intentions.

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Comment

Educating Those With Special Needs →

November 1, 1997

The private sector, including private sectarian schools, religious schools, nonpublic agencies, and homeschools, offers a wide variety of education programs for this difficult-to-educate population.

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The Predatory Price-Cutting Bogeyman →

July 1, 1997

Anti-capitalist literature is rife with demons, monsters, and other assorted bogeymen, but so are fairy tales.

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Comment
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Making the Case for Liberty Stick →

December 1, 1996

Too many battles are lost to statists because of a misplaced and hard-to-shake faith in government itself. For all its endless failures, now more widely perceived than at any time in decades, government is still regarded as real and tangible while free-market alternatives are often thought of as nebulous and imaginary.

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Comment

A Vote for Optimism →

April 1, 1996

Historians record that on the eve of the last millennium, around the year 999, the world was rife with dire predictions about the future.

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Block Grants Are Not The Answer →

July 1, 1995

We ought to be raising more fundamental questions with regard to everything the federal government does: Is this a legitimate function of any government? Why should this activity be coercively funded at all?

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Destruction is Not an Economic Blessing →

June 1, 1995

People helping people is a good thing. Wanton destruction of things of value is not. Simple truths, but some people don’t yet seem to fully comprehend them.

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Comment

Comparable Worth or Incomparably Worthless? →

April 1, 1995

Employers and employees can always produce “experts” who will rank jobs differently than any arbitrary formula, which is why imposing comparable worth would produce a playground for lawyers and a bottomless pit of costly litigation.

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Government Schools: Dissatisfaction Guaranteed and No Money Back →

February 1, 1995

In free markets where individual choice prevails, conflict is minimized. You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. If you don’t like the wares in one store, there’s no need to throw up a picket line. You don’t have to attend lengthy and boring meetings and be talked down to by public “servants.”

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Comment
KFC.jpg

Peking Duck or Kentucky Fried? →

December 1, 1988

Mao slaughtered millions for a stupid, evil cause but today, we can celebrate that he’s gone and KFC has been open in Beijing for more than three decades!

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Toward Radical Monetary Reform →

April 1, 1982

Once it was believed that witches, warlocks, and demons were the causes of such calamities as bad weather. Elaborate contrivances were devised to drive them away. When men learned that it wasn’t so, they looked for more natural, scientific explanations. 

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Seven Fallacies of Economics →

April 1, 1981

I for one am convinced that good economics is more than possible. It is imperative, and achieving it begins with the knowledge of what bad economics is all about.

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Comment

Witch-Hunting for Robber Barons: The Standard Oil Story →

March 1, 1980

Does the story of Standard Oil really present a case against the free market? No.

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What Price Control Really Means →

April 1, 1978

Two centuries after Adam Smith penned his eloquent defense of the right to be free from coercion, coercion is again in the ascendancy. It is seen by many as the “quick fix,” the answer to chronic problems, a panacea that will bring order out of chaos. In 1795, James Madison described this phenomenon as “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in government.”

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Comment

Is There an Unfavorable Balance of Trade? →

July 1, 1977

It ought to be obvious that trade is a two-way street. In a free mar­ket, where trade is a voluntary, de­sired, and spontaneous feature of human action, there is a "perfect balance."

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