Sheldon Richman

TGIF: The Challenging Art of Persuasion

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 29, 2021 | Featured Articles, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Anyone who hopes for a peaceful pro-liberty intellectual revolution is interested in the art of persuasion. But is it a practical art? Can enough people be persuaded to abandon long-held anti-liberty views for something quite different? I'm assuming here that one wishes to persuade people of positions that one really thinks to be right and true. Demagogues may try to sell propositions they don't actually hold, but let's leave them out of the story. Of course, even wrong and bad people can believe what they say and seek to persuade others of those views. But I'm thinking only of the...

TGIF: That Bloody Government Debt

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 22, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The government's attraction to borrowing is hardly a mystery. If the politicians had to extract every dollar they wanted to spend directly from the taxpayers, they might have a revolt on their hands--a bad career move for sure. Borrowing tends to make people more tolerant of bigger government than they would have been otherwise. After all, much of it looks free. They might scrutinize spending programs more closely if they paid the full price out of pocket. Thus forbidding borrowing and related central-bank inflation would put a lid on spending. That's why that program won't fly. As...

TGIF: Inflation Is Evil

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 15, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

When will Americans demand that the government denationalize money and free the market to do what it does better than anything else: serve the general welfare rather than the special interests? It's hard to know what it would take to bring this about, but inflation talk is once again in the air, and that's bad. Worse, it's in the shops. It had to happen after years of Fed Reserve's money creation, through the banking system, in the name of stimulating this or stimulating that. Forget the printing press. All the Fed has to do is buy up oodles of bank assets (government debt and bad private...

TGIF: Looking for the Green New Deal

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 8, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

I was all set this week to plunge into the details of the Green New Deal so I could see what new impositions the climate-alarmist politicians have in store for us. Then I made a startling discovery. (Startling for me, that is. I'm behind the news curve.) The Green New Deal isn't real. By that, I mean no bill in Congress sets out a list of specific government actions thought to be necessary to save the planet from carbon dioxide, heat waves, cold snaps, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, desertification, extinction, more rain and floods, more droughts, more trees, fewer tress, or...

TGIF: Why “Science Denial”?

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 1, 2021 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

In a new book two professors of psychology, Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer, seek to explain why what they call "science denial" is rampant today and how dangerous it is. They also give their account in a strange conversation with Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, from whom we might have expected a tad more "skepticism" or at least some devil's advocacy. The views of all three are in some ways vague and even confused, but the condescension toward the unenlightened rubes who disagree with them on certain scientific controversies--primarily climate- and COVID-19-related--couldn't...

As the Wise Man Said…

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 28, 2021 | Blog, Libertarianism

[T]the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man ... is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way.... The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty [for which] no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. --Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 4, Chapter 9

TGIF: Beware the Government-“Science” Complex

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 24, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The government-"science" complex ostensibly promotes the search for facts about our world, but it actually promotes and enforces orthodoxy, protects resulting paradigms, and manufactures apparent consensuses that are questioned only at one's reputational peril. That's why I put the word science in quotation marks. I could have called it pseudoscience or junk science. In contrast to real science, "science" is little more than the broadcast of evidence-free alarms that politicians and bureaucrats, advised by anointed government-financed "scientists," use to justify political action and...

Why Do Climate Alarmists Dislike Climate Realist-Optimists So Much?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 23, 2021 | Blog, Politics

F. A. Hayek, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist of the Austrian tradition, provided a possible answer to the question posed in the title. Although Hayek (1899-1992) to my knowledge had nothing to say about the climate controversy, his views on macroeconomics met with a similarly critical attitude from those who practiced economics at a level far, far removed from individual action. He too was in essence called a science denier, in this case the science was economics. Here's what he said when contrasting the method of the natural sciences of "simple phenomena" with the methods of social and...