Entries by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Censorship Is an ‘Unjustifiable Privilege’ by Chris Marchese

Free Speech Is about the Power to Challenge the Status Quo! Free speech is the great equalizer in our society. It doesn’t matter about your race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, class — you get the point — the First Amendment protects your right to speak freely. Despite this, some student activists […]

Why We Need to Make Mistakes: Innovation Is Better than Efficiency by Sandy Ikeda

“I think it is only because capitalism has proved so enormously more efficient than alternative methods that is has survived at all,” Milton Friedman told economist Randall E. Parker for Parker’s 2002 book, Reflections on the Great Depression. But I think innovation, not efficiency, is capitalism’s greatest strength. I’m not saying that the free market […]

California’s $15 Minimum Wage Is a Terrible, Unethical ‘Experiment’ by David R. Henderson

The law will have devastating consequences, particularly for immigrants, minorities, and the less educated. In yesterday’s Washington Post, Charles Lane reports on the move, that’s almost a done deal, to raise California’s minimum wage in stages to a whopping $15 an hour by 2022. Lane, or his editors, wisely titled the article, “The risks of […]

Try Everything! Shakira Is Right by Jeffrey Tucker

Once again, Disney has knocked it out of the park with a wonderfully catchy song at the end of its latest hit movie. The film is “Zootopia,” the inspirational story of a rabbit with ambitions to stretch her professional goals beyond prevailing familial and social expectations. The hit song, “Try Everything,” is performed by Shakira. […]

Socialist Education Hurts Students Long after the Classroom by Jeffrey A. Miron

According to a forthcoming paper by economists Nichola Fuchs Schundeln (Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt) and Paolo Masella (University of Sussex): Political regimes influence contents of education and criteria used to select and evaluate students. We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree and on several labor market outcomes by […]

Do European Labor Laws Lead to Terrorism? by Alex Tabarrok

Why are there poor Muslim ghettos in Europe but not in the United States? In Belgium, high unemployment and crime-ridden Muslim ghettos have fomented radicalism, but as Jeff Jacoby writes: Muslims in the United States … have had no problem acclimating to mainstream norms. In a detailed 2011 survey, the Pew Research Center found that Muslim Americans are […]

How the Minimum Wage Can Kill Job Growth without Eliminating Current Jobs by David R. Henderson

Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West have found that increases in the minimum wage destroy jobs, not so much by destroying current jobs as by reducing the growth rate of new jobs. That makes sense if employers’ investments in capital are even partially irreversible, that is, if some costs of capital investment are sunk, as seems […]

A ‘Carbon Tax’ Is a Utopian Fix that Can’t Survive Contact with Political Reality by Diana Furchtgott-Roth

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, suggests that Americans should pick a president who favors a carbon tax. But not even Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have proposed a carbon tax as part of their tax plans. All candidates have put forward detailed tax plans, and a carbon tax is not included […]

The War on Emojis by Gary McGath

Emoji are little picture symbols seen in text messages or social-media posts. Cute as they are, they’re often a center of controversy, and the Indonesian government has banned some of them, threatening to block access to websites that don’t cooperate. Emoji is a Japanese word meaning “picture characters.” The word isn’t related to “emoticon,” a […]

Ideas, Not ‘Capital,’ Enriched the World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

Why are we so rich? Who are “we”? Have our riches corrupted us? “The Bourgeois Era,” a series of three l-o-n-g books just completed  — thank God — answers: first, in The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), that the commercial bourgeoisie — the middle class of traders, dealers, inventors, and managers […]

Why Students Give Capitalism an ‘F’ by B.K. Marcus

Not only are young voters more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, they are also more likely to support the most left-wing Democrats. In recent polls of voters under 30, self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders beats the more mainstream Hillary Clinton by almost six-to-one. Former professor Mark Pastin, writing in the Weekly Standard, acknowledges some of […]