March 2005 -- President Bush's recent emphasis on reforming Social Security to include personal retirement accounts has been welcomed by free market advocates as a needed step toward giving people more control over their own lives. So far, much of the debate has focused on issues affecting individuals as participants in Social Security, such as what portion of their payroll taxes people should be allowed to invest in personal retirement accounts, how much the government should restrict investment choices in those accounts, and the extent to which Social Security should provide a minimum benefit relating to personal retirement accounts. Most current reform proposals provide that investment choices would not include individual stocks and bonds selected by the holders of personal accounts, but would be limited to diversified funds that invest in a broad range of stocks, bonds, or both. For example, under the Cato Institute proposal, employees would initially have three investment choices. An employee's contributions would be deposited in one of three balanced funds, each highly diversified and invested in thousands of securities. The default portfolio, where one's money would be invested if no choice were made, would have 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds. The two other funds would have the same asset classes but with different weights. (See Michael Tanner, " The 6.2 Percent Solution: A Plan for Reforming Social Security. ")
March 2005 -- Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from David Kelley's book A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare
America has been the land of the individual, and most Americans have thought of themselves as individualists. We still speak favorably of...
The word “tragedy” is generally misused, referring to everything from an act of war (9/11) to an act of God (the earthquake in Haiti). But today the word does apply: to the fall of Robert Moffat, formerly a senior vice president in charge of IBM’s hardware division and a good contender for becoming the company’s CEO. Today, he was sentenced to six months in prison for leaking confidential information to Danielle Chiesi, a consultant for the hedge fund New Castle, and, not coincidentally, Moffat’s mistress.
Todd Henderson, of the group blog “Truth on the Market,” had a suggestion last Thursday : Subject politicians to the same good-governance
Peter J. Henning is not a bad guy, despite the fact that he writes the column “ White Collar Watch ” for the New York Times. He is a professor of law at Wayne State University Law School, and he formerly posted at the “ White Collar Crime Prof ” blog, which takes an approach to its subject that is typical of the general culture but not rabidly anti-business. Certainly, Henning stands head and shoulders above his counterpart at the Washington Post, “ Market Cop ” Zach Goldfarb, a young punk who seems to have no qualifications at all for his position apart from having graduated from Princeton in 2005 with a virulent anti-capitalist animus.
Greg Reyes was scheduled to enter prison today, for eighteen months. But whether he did or did not, I have been unable to learn. I could find no stories about it in the national newspapers. I could find no stories about it in Google News. I could find no stories in Dow Jones’s Factiva database, with its 17,000 business sources. Finally, I called the San Francisco office of Bloomberg News, and they did not know.
One of the most effective tricks of the anti-business culture is to hold capitalists to a standard that they cannot possibly meet. For example, in the Martha Stewart case, U.S. Attorney James Comey declared: “This case is about lying.” Can you imagine what Mark Twain would have said if you’d told him that businessmen in the twenty-first century would be sent to jail for making inaccurate statements? He would have written an uproarious short story about a twenty-first century America in which prison sentences were visited upon lovers who made inaccurate statements to each other. “This is a case about lying,” his prosecutor would scream to the mob. Waving before the press a billet-doux that read 'I shall adore you forever,' the prosecutor would yell: "No mortal can adore another mortal forever. That is plain deceit. That is outright fraud."
Fall 2010 -- A full three-quarters of American voters are “angry” over current federal policies and believe “neither Republican political leaders nor Democratic political leaders have a good understanding of what is needed today,” according to a February 2010 poll by Rasmussen Reports. “Americans are united in the belief that the political system is broken, that most politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers,” Rasmussen explains.
Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process…is entitled to it. The situation is no
March 2002 -- The sudden bankruptcy of Enron Corporation is a scandal that has rocked support for the free market. Living in a division-of..
February 2002 -- Businessmen profiled in the popular press often mention Atlas Shrugged as their favorite book. Ayn Rand was one of the
June 2000 -- DAVID N. MAYER is Professor of Law and History at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches courses in American constitutional history, English and American legal history, and intellectual property (copyright and unfair trade practices law), as well as a seminar in Libertarianism and the Law. Before teaching at Capital, Professor Mayer taught at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law in Chicago, Illinois; held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia; and was an attorney with the firm of Pierson Semmes and Finley in Washington, D.C. He has received degrees from the University of Virginia (Ph.D. in History, 1988, and M.A. in History, 1982) and the University of Michigan (J.D. in 1980 and A.B. in 1977). He has written The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994, paperback 1995), Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2011), and several articles in law reviews, history and political science journals.
Last week, I wrote about my concept of malum insanum , behavior that is illegal only because some idiot in authority has issued an edict that makes it illegal. One of the most vivid examples of a mala insana has to be APBO No. 25, the edict that gave rise to the “crime” of failing to treat backdated options as a compensation expense. It is the “crime” for which Brocade’s former CEO, Greg Reyes, now faces prison.
Spring 2009 -- Individual, objective liberty rights make possible a society based on the principle of trade. One basic kind of interaction would be banned: initiating force against others. Force could only be permitted to be used defensively against others who had already initiated it. In other words, all your interactions with others would respect their freedom to choose. Interactions would also aim to be of benefit all the parties involved. Such a system would only be possible—and moral—if human interests did not fundamentally conflict. After all, if our interests conflicted, you could not seek your own benefit except through harming me, and vice versa. It would be self-sacrifice for the loser to accept trades in that circumstance. Objectivism holds that your own life is your ultimate value. Real self-sacrifice is what one should never do.
Spring 2009 -- Editor’s Note: In an interview conducted some 12 years ago with Navigator magazine (the predecessor of this publication), David N. Mayer, the author of " Completing the American Revolution " discussed specific institutional changes he would like to see enacted by a new American constitution. We asked Mayer if and how his beliefs have changed on these issues.
That’s the charge that Newsweek columnist and Slate Magazine editor Jacob Weisberg has laid against the advocates of markets in a recent..
Richard Henry Tawney (1880–1962) was a British historian who spent most of his career at the London School of Economics. He wrote widely on
March 2006 -- Some of the most frightening images from Nazi Germany can be seen in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the cinematic...
“Men and women are different,” says a frustrated soldier to a young girl who’s been questioning his authority in Jafar Panahi’s lighthearted
March 2005 -- President Bush's recent emphasis on reforming Social Security to include personal retirement accounts has been welcomed by free market advocates as a needed step toward giving people more control over their own lives. So far, much of the debate has focused on issues affecting individuals as participants in Social Security, such as what portion of their payroll taxes people should be allowed to invest in personal retirement accounts, how much the government should restrict investment choices in those accounts, and the extent to which Social Security should provide a minimum benefit relating to personal retirement accounts. Most current reform proposals provide that investment choices would not include individual stocks and bonds selected by the holders of personal accounts, but would be limited to diversified funds that invest in a broad range of stocks, bonds, or both. For example, under the Cato Institute proposal, employees would initially have three investment choices. An employee's contributions would be deposited in one of three balanced funds, each highly diversified and invested in thousands of securities. The default portfolio, where one's money would be invested if no choice were made, would have 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds. The two other funds would have the same asset classes but with different weights. (See Michael Tanner, " The 6.2 Percent Solution: A Plan for Reforming Social Security. ")
March 2005 -- Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from David Kelley's book A Life of One's Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare
America has been the land of the individual, and most Americans have thought of themselves as individualists. We still speak favorably of...
The word “tragedy” is generally misused, referring to everything from an act of war (9/11) to an act of God (the earthquake in Haiti). But today the word does apply: to the fall of Robert Moffat, formerly a senior vice president in charge of IBM’s hardware division and a good contender for becoming the company’s CEO. Today, he was sentenced to six months in prison for leaking confidential information to Danielle Chiesi, a consultant for the hedge fund New Castle, and, not coincidentally, Moffat’s mistress.
Todd Henderson, of the group blog “Truth on the Market,” had a suggestion last Thursday : Subject politicians to the same good-governance
Peter J. Henning is not a bad guy, despite the fact that he writes the column “ White Collar Watch ” for the New York Times. He is a professor of law at Wayne State University Law School, and he formerly posted at the “ White Collar Crime Prof ” blog, which takes an approach to its subject that is typical of the general culture but not rabidly anti-business. Certainly, Henning stands head and shoulders above his counterpart at the Washington Post, “ Market Cop ” Zach Goldfarb, a young punk who seems to have no qualifications at all for his position apart from having graduated from Princeton in 2005 with a virulent anti-capitalist animus.
Greg Reyes was scheduled to enter prison today, for eighteen months. But whether he did or did not, I have been unable to learn. I could find no stories about it in the national newspapers. I could find no stories about it in Google News. I could find no stories in Dow Jones’s Factiva database, with its 17,000 business sources. Finally, I called the San Francisco office of Bloomberg News, and they did not know.
One of the most effective tricks of the anti-business culture is to hold capitalists to a standard that they cannot possibly meet. For example, in the Martha Stewart case, U.S. Attorney James Comey declared: “This case is about lying.” Can you imagine what Mark Twain would have said if you’d told him that businessmen in the twenty-first century would be sent to jail for making inaccurate statements? He would have written an uproarious short story about a twenty-first century America in which prison sentences were visited upon lovers who made inaccurate statements to each other. “This is a case about lying,” his prosecutor would scream to the mob. Waving before the press a billet-doux that read 'I shall adore you forever,' the prosecutor would yell: "No mortal can adore another mortal forever. That is plain deceit. That is outright fraud."
Fall 2010 -- A full three-quarters of American voters are “angry” over current federal policies and believe “neither Republican political leaders nor Democratic political leaders have a good understanding of what is needed today,” according to a February 2010 poll by Rasmussen Reports. “Americans are united in the belief that the political system is broken, that most politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers,” Rasmussen explains.
Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process…is entitled to it. The situation is no
March 2002 -- The sudden bankruptcy of Enron Corporation is a scandal that has rocked support for the free market. Living in a division-of..
February 2002 -- Businessmen profiled in the popular press often mention Atlas Shrugged as their favorite book. Ayn Rand was one of the
June 2000 -- DAVID N. MAYER is Professor of Law and History at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches courses in American constitutional history, English and American legal history, and intellectual property (copyright and unfair trade practices law), as well as a seminar in Libertarianism and the Law. Before teaching at Capital, Professor Mayer taught at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law in Chicago, Illinois; held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia; and was an attorney with the firm of Pierson Semmes and Finley in Washington, D.C. He has received degrees from the University of Virginia (Ph.D. in History, 1988, and M.A. in History, 1982) and the University of Michigan (J.D. in 1980 and A.B. in 1977). He has written The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994, paperback 1995), Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2011), and several articles in law reviews, history and political science journals.
Last week, I wrote about my concept of malum insanum , behavior that is illegal only because some idiot in authority has issued an edict that makes it illegal. One of the most vivid examples of a mala insana has to be APBO No. 25, the edict that gave rise to the “crime” of failing to treat backdated options as a compensation expense. It is the “crime” for which Brocade’s former CEO, Greg Reyes, now faces prison.
Spring 2009 -- Individual, objective liberty rights make possible a society based on the principle of trade. One basic kind of interaction would be banned: initiating force against others. Force could only be permitted to be used defensively against others who had already initiated it. In other words, all your interactions with others would respect their freedom to choose. Interactions would also aim to be of benefit all the parties involved. Such a system would only be possible—and moral—if human interests did not fundamentally conflict. After all, if our interests conflicted, you could not seek your own benefit except through harming me, and vice versa. It would be self-sacrifice for the loser to accept trades in that circumstance. Objectivism holds that your own life is your ultimate value. Real self-sacrifice is what one should never do.
Spring 2009 -- Editor’s Note: In an interview conducted some 12 years ago with Navigator magazine (the predecessor of this publication), David N. Mayer, the author of " Completing the American Revolution " discussed specific institutional changes he would like to see enacted by a new American constitution. We asked Mayer if and how his beliefs have changed on these issues.
That’s the charge that Newsweek columnist and Slate Magazine editor Jacob Weisberg has laid against the advocates of markets in a recent..
Richard Henry Tawney (1880–1962) was a British historian who spent most of his career at the London School of Economics. He wrote widely on
March 2006 -- Some of the most frightening images from Nazi Germany can be seen in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the cinematic...
“Men and women are different,” says a frustrated soldier to a young girl who’s been questioning his authority in Jafar Panahi’s lighthearted