Entries by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Democracy Can’t Really Be Democratic by Ilya Somin

Recent debates over the meaning of “one person, one vote” and the lessons of ancient Greek democracy for the modern world highlight an important truth about democracy: it can’t be democratic all the way down. Lincoln famously said that democracy is “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” But before “the people” can govern anything, someone […]

Capitalists Have a Better Plan: Why Decentralized Planning Is Superior to Bureaucracy and Socialism by Robert P. Murphy

To early 20th-century intellectuals, capitalism looked like anarchy. Why, they wondered, would we trust deliberative, conscious guidance when building a house but not when building an economy? It was fashionable among these socialist intellectuals to espouse “planning” as a much more rational way to organize economic activity. (F.A. Hayek wrote a famous essay on the phenomenon.) […]

The Slow-Motion Financial Suicide of the Roman Empire by Lawrence W. Reed & Marc Hyden

More than 2,000 years before America’s bailouts and entitlement programs, the ancient Romans experimented with similar schemes. The Roman government rescued failing institutions, canceled personal debts, and spent huge sums on welfare programs. The result wasn’t pretty. Roman politicians picked winners and losers, generally favoring the politically well connected — a practice that’s central to […]

Can Millennials [And Academia] Take a Joke? by Clark Conner

Millennials can be a hypersensitive bunch, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the academy. American institutions of higher learning have become veritable minefields of trigger warnings, safe zones, and speech codes. It appears we can add another line item to the growing list of things too radical for college students: humor. Comedian Jerry […]

Marco Rubio’s Brave Defense of Corporate Welfare, Farm Subsidies, and Protectionism by James Bovard

America would be more prosperous if not a single sugar beet or sugar cane were grown anywhere in the United States because bankrolling sugar production in Florida makes as little sense as growing bananas in Maine. So when Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., walked into the Koch conclave earlier this month and defended his home state boondoggle in front […]

The War on Air Conditioning Heats Up: Is Climate Control Immoral? by Sarah Skwire

It started with the pope. In his recent encyclical, Laudato Si’, he singled out air conditioning as a particularly good example of wasteful habits and excessive consumption that overcome our better natures: People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than […]

The Most Impossible Thing in “MI: Rogue Nation” by Jeffrey A. Tucker

There’s a scene in “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation” that seems entirely plausible. The bad guy is transferring a huge amount of money, something like $1 billion. He has a hand-held device and clicks the button. We see a progress bar. The operation takes only a few seconds and then there is a ding. Done! Wow, […]

The Credential Is Killing the Classroom by Isaac M. Morehouse

“I wish college were like this!” I hear this exclamation over and over at the seminars put on by organizations like the Foundation for Economic Education and the Institute for Humane Studies. Attendees are blown away by the excellence of the content, the professors’ willingness to engage students even in free time, and the intelligence […]

Can We Afford ‘Affordable Care’? by D.W. MacKenzie

Does the Supreme Court decision upholding health insurance subsidies prove that Obamacare is here to stay? With its legality settled, the longevity of the healthcare program is supposed to be politically inevitable. The millions of voters who receive subsidies from the Affordable Care Act will not tolerate the loss of this money. Insurance companies will […]

Politics in One Page: Elections Are Great Illusions by Jeffrey A. Tucker

In every election season, a new generation comes of age and experiences the political theater for the first time. The experience is formative. It challenges you to decide what you think about the world. Which candidate best represents my values and shares my sense of how things ought to be? More fundamentally, how should things […]

Capitalists from Outer Space by B.K. Marcus

When the aliens stop trifling with crop circles, bumpkin abduction, and indelicate probes and finally introduce themselves to the rest of humanity, will they turn out to be partisans of central planning, interventionism, or unhampered markets? This is not the question asked by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, but whether or not the […]

The Essence of the Road to Serfdom — in Cartoons! by F. A. Hayek

In 1944, F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom rocked the English-speaking world. The book argued that there can be no political or civil liberty without economic liberty as a first principle. Every step away from economic liberty takes us closer to authoritarian control over the whole of society. With central control comes corruption, servitude, and relative […]

Scandinavian Myths: High Taxes and Big Spending Are Popular by Nima Sanandaji

As I have explained in previous columns for CapX, there are a number of myths surrounding the Nordic countries that don’t stand up to scrutiny. These include the notion that long life span in Nordic nations arose as the public sector expanded, the idea that generous public programs alone explain low levels of Nordic poverty and the myth that Nordic countries […]