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The Free Market 23, no. 9 (September 2003)   I t happens in every bear market and in every crash. Investors get it wrong. Then regulators get it wrong. They look for scapegoats and find the wrong ones. They whoop up a holy war in the popular press as markets are embraced by a persistent bear. They indict the wrong people. They’re like the

The Free Market 20, no. 1 (January 2002)   And you thought the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) was only for fat cats! The hired help on the Potomac, many of whom reluctantly approved a piddly little tax cut this summer, are going to give a new meaning, over the next few years, to that wonderful principle of fiscal skullduggery and political

The Free Market 20, no. 3 (March 2002)   On May Day 1971, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, later known as Amtrak, took over a group of overregulated bankrupt private railroads. Officials of Amtrak, which is a blending of the words American and track, announced that the government would make money on these bankrupt railroads. The public

Social Security was not just about the provision of publicly funded old-age pensions in the name of social insurance. It was designed as a tool of macroeconomic policy, a social arm of central planning passed in age of boundless faith in the power of the state. As such, the program was steeped in economic fallacy and became an integral part of the

The Republicans failed on health care, but now they are offering a new plan for tax and spending cuts, with a promise of smaller government. But the GOP, with few exceptions, seems about as creditable as the Democrats and their flawed, small-business killer, Obamacare. Many of the Democrats are people who subscribe to a socialism without

History is something one can try to escape, but sometimes you can’t as millions of train riders find out every day. They can’t escape Penn Station falling apart along with Amtrak, New York City commuter railroads, and the New York City subways. They all have the same problem: Every day they are reminded of the sordid history of government

Amtrak’s Penn Station in New York City, once one of the most glorious cathedrals of commerce built by one of the most successful transportation companies in history, is collapsing. Tracks are in disrepair. That’s because they have not been properly maintained over decades since Amtrak, despite promises to the contrary at its founding in the 1970s,

If you can pay through the nose here, you can pay through the nose anywhere. That’s because the most common complaint of overtaxed New Yorkers for generations has been housing costs here are outrageous. This happens in a city and state in which rent control laws have persisted for generations, going back to the 1940s and even before then. Yet

Social Security, the primary retirement savings tool and biggest tax for millions of Americans, is a bad deal, critics contend. They argue that mandatory Social Security is a poor investment because it only provides an average annual income of some $17,000. This is a lousy return on the decades of tax payments, critics contend. They say most would

The biggest political issue over the next fifteen years may be changing conditions that affect how much Social Security can pay. This would include the decline in the ratio of those who are paying into the system to those collecting. Once this was as much was some forty-two to one. Today the ratio is down to about three to one. That ratio will