Author: Maxine Eichner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190055472
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
A steady drumbeat of bad news about the state of our nation has convinced Americans that our country has gone off the rails. But where, exactly, did we go wrong? Maxine Eichner argues that the problem is that market pressures are overwhelming American families today. Eichner links "free-market family policy," a system in which families must fend for themselves without help from the government, to unstable relationships, reduced lifespans, kids' declining academicachievement, and low levels of happiness, compared with other wealthy countries. What's called for, she argues, is market regulation and an economy structured around supporting families.
Author: John Medaille
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684516889
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
Taking "free markets" from rhetoric to reality For three decades free-market leaders have tried to reverse longstanding Keynesian economic policies, but have only produced larger government, greater debt, and more centralized economic power. So how can we achieve a truly free-market system, especially at this historical moment when capitalism seems to be in crisis? The answer, says John C. Medaille, is to stop pretending that economics is something on the order of the physical sciences; it must be a humane science, taking into account crucial social contexts. Toward a Truly Free Market argues that any attempt to divorce economic equilibrium from economic equity will lead to an unbalanced economy—one that falls either to ruin or to ruinous government attempts to redress the balance. Medaille makes a refreshingly clear case for the economic theory—and practice—known as distributism. Unlike many of his fellow distributists, who argue primarily from moral terms, Medaille enters the economic debate on purely economic terms. Toward a Truly Free Market shows exactly how to end the bailouts, reduce government budgets, reform the tax code, fix the health-care system, and much more.
Author: Maxine Eichner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190055480
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
US families have been pushed to the wall. At the bottom of the economic ladder, poor and working-class adults aren't forming stable relationships and can't give their kids the start they need because of low wages and uncertain job prospects. Toward the top, professional parents' lives have become a grinding slog of long hours of paid work. Meanwhile their kids are overstressed by pressure to succeed and get into good colleges. In this provocative book, Maxine Eichner argues that these very different struggles might seem unconnected, but they share the same root cause: the increasingly large toll that economic inequality and insecurity are taking on families. It's government rather than families that's to blame, Eichner persuasively contends. Since the 1970s, politicians have sold families out to the wrongheaded notion that the free market alone best supports them. In five decades of "free-market family policy," they've scrapped government programs and gutted market regulations that had helped families thrive. The consequence is the steady drumbeat of bad news we hear about our country today: the opioid epidemic, skyrocketing suicide and mental illness rates, "deaths of despair," and mediocre student achievement scores. Meanwhile, politicians just keep telling families to work a little harder. The Free-Market Family documents US families' impossible plight, showing how much worse they fare than families in other countries. It then demonstrates how politicians' free-market illusions steered our nation wildly off course. Finally, it shows how, using commonsense measures, we can restructure the economy to work for families, rather than the reverse. Doing so would invest in our children's futures, increase our wellbeing, reknit our social fabric, and allow our country to reclaim the American Dream.
Author: Melinda Cooper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 194213004X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.
Author: Peter A. Ubel
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422140318
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Humans just aren't entirely rational creatures. We decide to roll over and hit the snooze button instead of going to the gym. We take out home loans we can't possibly afford. And did you know that people named Paul are more likely to move to St. Paul than other cities? All too often, our subconscious causes us to act against our own self-interest. But our free-market economy is based on the assumption that we always do act in our own self-interest. In this provocative book, physician Peter Ubel uses his understanding of psychology and behavior to show that in some cases government must regulate markets for our own health and well-being. And by understanding and controlling the factors that go into our decisions, big and small, we can all begin to stop the damage we do to our bodies, our finances, and our economy as a whole. Ubel's vivid stories bring his message home for anyone interested in improving the way our society works.
Author: John R. Lott Jr.
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
ISBN: 1596985062
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Challenges the philosophical tenets of "Freakonomics" through case studies that demonstrate the theory that the more costly something is, the less of it people will do, in an economic analysis that covers such topics as price discrimination and corporatescandals.
Author: Bernard E. Harcourt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971329
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.
Author: Yaron Brook
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1137079347
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A look at how our current crises are caused by too much government, and how Ayn Rand's bold defense of free markets can help us change course. The rise of the Tea Party and the 2010 election results revealed that tens of millions of Americans are alarmed by Big Government, but skeptical that anything can or will be done to stop the growth of the state. In Free Market Revolution, the keepers of Ayn Rand's legacy argue that the answer lies in her pioneering philosophy of capitalism and self-interest –a philosophy that more and more people are turning to for answers. In the past few years, Rand's works have surged to new peaks of popularity, as politicians like Paul Ryan, media figures like John Stossel, and businessmen like John Mackey routinely name her as one of their chief influences. Here, Brook and Watkins explain how her ideas can solve a host of political and economic ills, including the debt crisis, inflation, overregulation, and the swelling welfare state. And most important, they show how Rand's philosophy can enable defenders of the free market to sieze the moral high ground in the fight to limit government. This is a fresh and urgent look at the ideas of one of the most controversial figures in modern history – ideas that may prove the only hope for the future.
Author: Wilhelm Röpke
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497636426
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
“A Humane Economy is like a seminar on integral freedom conducted by a professor of uncommon brilliance.” —Wall Street Journal “If any person in our contemporary world is entitled to a hearing it is Wilhelm Röpke.” —New York Times A Humane Economy offers one of the most accessible and compelling explanations of how economies operate ever written. The masterwork of the great twentieth-century economist Wilhelm Röpke, this book presents a sweeping, brilliant exposition of market mechanics and moral philosophy. Röpke cuts through the jargon and statistics that make most economic writing so obscure and confusing. Over and over, the great Swiss economist stresses one simple point: you cannot separate economic principles from human behavior. Röpke’s observations are as relevant today as when they were first set forth a half century ago. He clearly demonstrates how those societies that have embraced free-market principles have achieved phenomenal economic success—and how those that cling to theories of economic centralization endure stagnation and persistent poverty. A Humane Economy shows how economic processes and government policies influence our behavior and choices—to the betterment or detriment of life in those vital and highly fragile human structures we call communities. “It is the precept of ethical and humane behavior, no less than of political wisdom,” Röpke reminds us, “to adapt economic policy to man, not man to economic policy.”
Author: John Tomasi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691158142
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
A provocative new vision of free market capitalism that achieves liberal ends by libertarian means Can libertarians care about social justice? In Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi argues that they can and should. Drawing simultaneously on moral insights from defenders of economic liberty such as F. A. Hayek and advocates of social justice such as John Rawls, Tomasi presents a new theory of liberal justice. This theory, free market fairness, is committed to both limited government and the material betterment of the poor. Unlike traditional libertarians, Tomasi argues that property rights are best defended not in terms of self-ownership or economic efficiency but as requirements of democratic legitimacy. At the same time, he encourages egalitarians concerned about social justice to listen more sympathetically to the claims ordinary citizens make about the importance of private economic liberty in their daily lives. In place of the familiar social democratic interpretations of social justice, Tomasi offers a "market democratic" conception of social justice: free market fairness. Tomasi argues that free market fairness, with its twin commitment to economic liberty and a fair distribution of goods and opportunities, is a morally superior account of liberal justice. Free market fairness is also a distinctively American ideal. It extends the notion, prominent in America's founding period, that protection of property and promotion of real opportunity are indivisible goals. Indeed, according to Tomasi, free market fairness is social justice, American style. Provocative and vigorously argued, Free Market Fairness offers a bold new way of thinking about politics, economics, and justice—one that will challenge readers on both the left and right.
