Free Republic

'I'll donate a dollar to pay down the deficit for every dollar that Congressional Republicans donate' taunts Warren Buffet in a Reuters article (n.b. indirect quote). He must have finished President Obama's copy of "Rules for Radicals" and decided to get on the fun side--the media's side--of the Statist v. Liberty conflict. Annoying your enemy, especially to the delight of community organizers, is a winning tactic according to the realistic revolutionary's handbook. The irony of the quintessential "Have" speaking in the name of the "Have Nots" to persuade the "Have Some, Want Mores" to play in a game that gives...

From 'The Economist' print edition Attitudes towards redistribution have a strong cultural component ARGUMENTS over economic policy are often heated. Debates about the extent to which tax and welfare policy should redistribute wealth from rich to poor tend to be particularly fractious. Understanding why people hold different opinions on the topic interests economists, not least because citizens’ attitudes towards such matters are likely to influence the governments they elect. Some of the evidence from individual countries conforms to standard economic reasoning. Richer people, who have least to gain from redistribution, are usually less keen on it than their poorer compatriots....

“Oh, yes, I know, we have recently been told by no less than 365 academic economists that such a thing cannot be . . .Their confidence in the accuracy of their own predictions leaves me breathless. But having been brought up over the shop, I sometimes wonderwhether they pay back their forecasts with their money.” —Margaret Thatcher, 1979 As our $500 billion/yr trade deficit, with its attendant job destruction and long-term damage to our industrial base, continues to spiral out of control, the public may be forgiven for wondering whether there might be problems with the free-trade theories that have...

The Atlantic Monthly | January/February 2004   State of the Union The Economy America's "Suez Moment" The growing trade deficit threatens U.S. living standards and makes the country dangerously vulnerable to economic extortion. The way out is to make foreigners act more like us  by Sherle R. Schwenninger   .....   espite its unchallenged military might, the United States has an Achilles' heel: its economy depends on foreign capital. Though hardly anyone acknowledges this publicly, China and Japan already hold so much American debt that, theoretically, each could exert enormous leverage on American foreign policy. So far, the economic...

No-one wants to talk about Japan these days. The conventional wisdom is that the bloom went off Japan’s economic rose around 1990 and that the utter superiority of neoliberal capitalism was vindicated by the strong performance of the American economy during the 1990s. Furthermore, everyone is now convinced that China – whose economy is 1/8 the size of Japan’s – is the rising economic power and therefore the appropriate object of attention. But Japan is, despite everything, still one of the master keys to understanding the future of the world economy, because Japan is the clearest case study of why...