The Heartland Institute

James McGill Buchanan Jr. died Wednesday, January 9, 2013 in Blacksburg, Virginia. In 1986 he won the Nobel Prize in economics mainly for establishing the public choice school of economics. I was a student at his graduate seminar in public choice at University of California-Los Angeles when he was visiting professor in the ...

( Originally published in American Thinker ) The high-level exchanges about the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) have come down on two sides. Six secretaries of state argue that the United States must ratify and participate in order to protect its national interests, mainly military navigational freedoms. Two former cabinet officers ...

The weekend ending Sept. 23 was momentous in many respects. The S& P 500 index went down 6 percent. The price of gold on the Comex fell by 8.5 percent. Silver, copper, and crude oil also fell in price, although not as much as gold. The CBOE expected-volatility indexes for the S& P 500 (VIX) and gold (GVZ) were at 40 ...

Broadening the tax base and lowering tax rates, the current whiz-bang solution to both the government debt problem and the recession, has the support of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) from the political left and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) on the political right. That in itself ought to make folks suspicious. The first question that ...

Broadening the tax base and lowering the rate, the current whiz-bang solution to both the government debt problem and the recession, has the support of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) from the political left and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) on the political right. That in itself ought to make folks suspicious. Now that the Chicago Tribune ...

Thursday, August 4: Senate votes to pass House bill that will raise taxes. Dow Jones Industrial Average loses 513. Friday, August 5: Standard & Poor’s downgrades U.S. sovereign debt from AAA to AA+. Dow Jones Industrial Average gains 61. Monday, August 8: President Obama repeats threat to raise taxes as a part of a “balanced ...

The 28-member International Energy Agency last week agreed to release 60 million barrels of oil from the world s reserves in the next 30 days. Half would be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the United States, 30 percent from Europe and 20 percent from Asian countries. One day before that decision, Saudi Arabia ...

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) delivered an excellent speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in late May focusing on his debt reduction plan. Ryan observed that government spending has increased at a record rate but the economy has not recovered to any substantial degree. Control of government spending, according to Ryan, is crucial ...

On March 30, President Obama repeated the familiar energy policy refrain of increasing the nation s independence from foreign oil in order to control energy prices. As The Wall Street Journal observed a day later, this cliche has been repeated by every president since Richard Nixon. That alone ought to make the prescription ...

I am not a happy camper. I live in Wilmette, Illinois. School District 39 in the village where I live is facing a $5.5 million deficit this year. To offset the deficit, a property tax increase amounting to $6.4 million is proposed with the prospect of more tax increases in subsequent years because of increasing deficits ...

Recovery from a recession can be a tricky thing. However, it need not be. The simple approach is to identify the cause, fashion the policies that deal with the cause, and then let the market adjust without obstacles from the government. The adjustment will take time if the recession is deep. What does not help is trying ...

As the media look for signs the economy is heating up and whether a recovery will be in place when President Obama runs for re-election it's a good time to consider the likely effects of the latest initiative from the Federal Reserve, called quantitative easing (QE2), on top of the administration's other economic policies ...

Editorials these days are ruing the loss of the cap and trade legislation intended to offset the supposed trend in global warming. An example is the 2010 Labor Day editorial in the Chicago Tribune. The villains in the piece are Republicans, who are out to score partisan political points in advance of the off-year elections ...

GUEST OPINION Editorials these days are ruing the loss of the cap-and-trade legislation intended to offset the supposed trend in global warming. An example is the 2010 Labor Day editorial in the Chicago Tribune. The villains in the piece are Republicans, who are out to score partisan political points in advance of the off ...

Review of It s Not As Bad As You Think, Why Capitalism Trumps Fear and the Economy Will Thrive, by Brian S. Wesbury (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2010), ISBN: 978-0-470-23833-2, $24.95 Brian Wesbury s new book is for investors, policy analysts, market forecasters, ordinary citizens, and government regulators and politicians, if they ...

In early April, the Energy Information Administration and School of Advanced International Studies hosted a Washington, DC conference addressing energy issues. Heartland Institute Policy Advisor Jim Johnston, who attended the event, said the speakers essentially " condemned energy use." Among those speakers were Energy Secretary and ...

Judy Shelton s critique of the Federal Reserve System under Chairman Ban Bernanke ( The Wall Street Journal on January 8, 2010) was headed for a touchdown. She correctly identifies gold securities as having the potential for protecting the American public from inflation and providing guidance for monetary policy. But she fumbles ...

There are a few things the supporters of the House and Senate climate bills apparently do not want you to know. Consider the following. Property Rights Denied Section 721 of both bills denies property right status to tradable allowances and offset credits. In addition, it does not alter the authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory ...

Energy independence is bad economics and bad public policy. Energy supply, as viewed in economics, is ordered according to cost, with the least-costly energy produced first, and the more-costly supply added later from a variety of sources. The total supply is determined where the cost of the last unit produced is just equal ...

The leaders of the world have declared war on speculation. The Obama administration s Commodity Futures Trading Commission is considering position limits on the trading of energy contracts. U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and France s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, have urged improving transparency and supervision of the oil futures ...