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RECOMMENDED WEBSITES IDEAS ON LIBERTY SPEECHES MISC
Updated: November 12, 2008
On this page you will find a wide variety of topics ranging from opportunities to learn more about liberty and economics.
Essays on Liberty and Economics
Supply-Side Economics: Myths and Realities
The Entrepreneur as American Hero
Yertle the Turtle (to help children understand the value of liberty)
How a Capitalist Won World War II
The Supreme Court and our Founders
Freedom Fest
Every year the Young America's Foundation holds Freedom Fest - a three day series devoted to speeches and debates on liberty, the role of government in the economy and principles of individualism. Young America's Foundation has cast as its primary mission the promotion of the philosophy espoused by President Ronald Reagan. In 2004 ABC's John Stossel (seen here to my immediate left) and I were invited to speek at Freedom Fest. To order a copy of his speech entitled, "Enemies of Liberty" log onto YAF.org. To hear my speech on "The Curse of Alexander Hamilton" enter the SPEECHES section.
On May 13, 2005 I delivered a speech at Freedom Fest entitled, "Is Socialism America's Destiny?" CD's of the speech are available from the YAF website.
Liberty and Economics in the Movies
Miracle - Students of economics and liberty will love the underlying theme of dynamic capitalism triumphing over statist communism.
The Pursuit of Happyness - A look at the difference between rights and interests
Braveheart - Perhaps the greatest movie on human liberty ever made.
Flash of Genius - Why private property rights are important...
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rands' book as a movie.
Cinderella Man - Not only does this movie illustrate how the welfare state was not openly embraced by Americans in the 1930s, but there is a terrific scene where the boxer's manager and a fight promoter illustrate the power of Adam Smith's views of the self-interested man.
The Shawshank Redemption - One of the greatest movies ever on the subject of individual liberty and morality.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - Students of Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution will love this movie.
The Perfect Storm - Good or bad capitalism? Rational or irrational behavior?
Born Free - A wonderful movie to teach kids the difference between liberty and security
The Patriot - Mel Gibson's quote about tyrants early in the movie is a classic.
The Alamo - There is also a nice application of game theory in one scene for those of you who enjoy that subject. Hint: A violin is involved...
Open Range - An interesting look at the definition of property.
Saving Private Ryan - A terrific examination of resource use, opportunity cost and cost-benefit analysis.
Syriana - A disturbing, and relatively realistic look at the oil business - with a reference to Milton Friedman included!
You've Got Mail - For a look at the 'conventional wisdom' (i.e. wrong way of thinking) on the issue of predatory pricing.
The Rookie - This movie is one long exercise in the concept of opportunity cost.
Hoffa - For an interesting look at the labor union movement.
Wall Street - Another anti-Capitalism movie. The zero-sum game scene is typical of what Hollywood doesn't understand about markets.
'V' for Vendetta - The future?
When is TAX FREEDOM DAY in your state?
The average American worked until April 23rd of this year just to pay off the government. Depending on the state you live in, you might be a serf a little longer. I hope the news is good for you.
Do you live in an economically free state?
For many Americans, liberty is jeopardy because of the state they live in. Tax rates, regulations on businesses, eminent domain abuse and other factors contribute to economic liberty - or the lack thereof. To find out if you live in a state where freedom is respected, click here. Good luck!
The Economics of Education - Does school choice improve test scores? Is home-school a viable option? Click on the appropriate links to find out. Speaking of education, you must take a look at a brand new childrens book entitled, "Why Mommy is a Democrat". It speaks volumes about what kids are getting in our government schools. Try not to cry.
Global Rankings of Economic Freedom - Where to live if you want liberty...
To learn more about what these rankings mean visit the Heritage Foundation
website.
CountryRank[Score] Hong Kong 1 [1.28] Croatia 55 [2.78] Zambia 111 [3.34] Singapore 2 [1.56] Greece 57 [2.80] China 111 [3.34] Ireland 3 [1.58] Jordan 57 [2.80] Kazakhstan 113 [3.35] Luxembourg 4 [1.60] Macedonia 57 [2.80] Mozambique 113 [3.35] United Kingdom 5 [1.74] Mexico 60 [2.83] Niger 115 [3.38] Iceland 5 [1.74] Mongolia 60 [2.83] Dominican Republic 116 [3.39] Estonia 7 [1.75] Saudi Arabia 62 [2.84] Benin 117 [3.40] Denmark 8 [1.78] Peru 63 [2.86] Central African Republic 118 [3.41] United States 9 [1.84] Bulgaria 64 [2.88] Algeria 119 [3.46] Australia 9 [1.84] United Arab Emirates 65 [2.93] Cameroon 119 [3.46] New Zealand 9 [1.84] Uganda 66 [2.95] India 121 [3.49] Canada 12 [1.85] Bolivia 67 [2.96] Russia 122 [3.50] Finland 12 [1.85] Cambodia 68 [2.98] Azerbaijan 123 [3.51] Chile 14 [1.88] Georgia 68 [2.98] Gambia, The 123 [3.51] Switzerland 15 [1.89] Malaysia 68 [2.98] Rwanda 125 [3.53] Cyprus 16 [1.90] Thailand 71 [2.99] Nepal 125 [3.53] Netherlands 16 [1.90] Kyrgyz Republic, The 71 [2.99] Guinea 127 [3.55] Austria 18 [1.95] Lebanon 73 [3.00] Egypt 128 [3.59] Sweden 19 [1.96] Bosnia and Herzegovina 74 [3.01] Suriname 129 [3.60] Germany 19 [1.96] Guatemala 74 [3.01] Malawi 130 [3.63] Czech Republic 21 [2.10] Oman 74 [3.01] Guinea Bissau 131 [3.65] Belgium 22 [2.11] Mauritius 77 [3.03] Burundi 132 [3.69] Lithuania 23 [2.14] Qatar 78 [3.04] Ethiopia 133 [3.70] Malta 24 [2.16] Swaziland 78 [3.04] Togo 134 [3.71] Bahrain 25 [2.23] Nicaragua 80 [3.05] Indonesia 134 [3.71] Barbados 26 [2.25] Brazil 81 [3.08] Equatorial Guinea 136 [3.74] Armenia 27 [2.26] Mauritania 81 [3.08] Sierra Leone 137 [3.76] Bahamas 27 [2.26] Senegal 83 [3.10] Tajikistan 137 [3.76] Japan 27 [2.26] Moldova 83 [3.10] Yemen 139 [3.84] Portugal 30 [2.29] Turkey 85 [3.11] Angola 139 [3.84] Botswana 30 [2.29] Guyana 85 [3.11] Bangladesh 141 [3.88] Norway 30 [2.29] Namibia 85 [3.11] Vietnam 142 [3.89] Spain 33 [2.33] Ivory Coast 88 [3.14] Congo, Republic of 143 [3.90] Slovak Republic, The 34 [2.35] Mali 88 [3.14] Uzbekistan 144 [3.91] El Salvador 34 [2.35] Fiji 90 [3.15] Syria 145 [3.93] Israel 36 [2.36] Colombia 91 [3.16] Nigeria 146 [4.00] Taiwan 37 [2.38] Romania 92 [3.19] Haiti 147 [4.03] Slovenia 38 [2.41] Sri Lanka 92 [3.19] Turkmenistan 148 [4.04] Latvia 39 [2.43] Tanzania 94 [3.20] Laos 149 [4.08] Hungary 40 [2.44] Djibouti 94 [3.20] Cuba 150 [4.10] Poland 41 [2.49] Kenya 94 [3.20] Belarus 151 [4.11] Trinidad and Tobago 42 [2.50] Morocco 97 [3.21] Venezuela 152 [4.16] Italy 42 [2.50] Philippines, The 98 [3.23] Libya 152 [4.16] France 44 [2.51] Tunisia 99 [3.24] Zimbabwe 154 [4.23] Korea, South 45 [2.63] Ukraine 99 [3.24] Burma 155 [4.46] Uruguay 46 [2.69] Lesotho 99 [3.24] Iran 156 [4.51] Cape Verde 46 [2.69] Burkina Faso 102 [3.28] Korea, North 157 [5.00] Costa Rica 46 [2.69] Gabon 102 [3.28] Serbia and Montenegro - Not Graded Panama 49 [2.70] Honduras 102 [3.28] Sudan - Not Graded South Africa 50 [2.74] Chad 105 [3.29] Congo, Dem. Republic of - Not Graded Kuwait 50 [2.74] Ghana 105 [3.29] Iraq - Not Graded Albania 52 [2.75] Argentina 107 [3.30] Madagascar 52 [2.75] Ecuador 107 [3.30] Jamaica 54 [2.76] Paraguay 109 [3.31] Belize 55 [2.78] Pakistan 110 [3.33]
Why you should consider economics as your major...
The Hot Major for Undergrads Seeking High Pay Is Economics
by Jessica E. Vascellaro
Provided by CareerJournal.com
What's your major? Around the world, college undergraduates' time-honored question is increasingly drawing the same answer: economics.
Colleges and universities in the United States awarded 16,141 degrees to economics majors in the 2003-2004 academic year, up nearly 40 percent from five years earlier, according to John J. Siegfried, an economics professor at Vanderbilt University. Siegfried tracks 272 colleges and universities around the country for the Journal of Economic Education.
The number of college students majoring in economics has been rising since the mid-1990s, according to the government's National Center for Education Statistics. Meanwhile, the number majoring in political science and government has declined and the number majoring in history and sociology has barely grown.
"There has been a clear explosion of economics as a major," says Mark Gertler, chairman of New York University's economics department.
The number of students majoring in economics has been rising even faster at top colleges. At New York University, for example, the number of econ majors has more than doubled in the past ten years. At nearly 800, it is now the most popular major.
Economics also is the most popular major at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where 964 students majored in the subject in 2005. The number of econ majors at Columbia University in New York has risen 67 percent since 1995. The University of Chicago said that last year, 24 percent of its entire graduating class, 240 students, departed with economics degrees.
The trend marks a big switch for the so-called dismal science, which saw big declines in undergraduate enrollments in the early 1990s as interest in other areas, like sociology, was growing. Behind the turnaround is a clear-eyed reading of supply and demand: In a global economy filled with uncertainty, many students see economics as the best vehicle for a job promising good pay and security.
And as its focus broadens, there are even some signs that economics is becoming cool.
In addition to probing the mechanics of inflation and exchange rates, academics now use statistics and an economist's view of how people respond to incentives to study issues such as AIDS, obesity and even terrorism. The surprise bestseller of the spring was Freakonomics, a book co-authored by a University of Chicago economist, Steven Levitt, which examines issues ranging from corruption among real estate agents to sumo wrestling.
Pooja Jotwani, a recent graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., says she is certain her economics degree helped her land a job in Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s sales and trading division, where she will earn $55,000, not including bonus. She says the major strengthened her business skills and provided her with something very simple: financial security.
"People are fascinated with applying the economic mode of reasoning to a wide variety of issues, and these forces are causing them to study economics more and more," says Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard and former secretary of the Treasury.
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, economics majors in their first job earn an average of nearly $43,000 a year--not as much as for computer science majors and engineering majors, who can earn in excess of $50,000 a year. But those computer and engineering jobs look increasingly threatened by competition from inexpensive, highly skilled workers in places like India and China.
"Historically, the trends [in college degrees] are largely connected to perceived job prospects," says Marvin Lazerson, historian of education and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education in Philadelphia. He cites the recent example of computer science majors, whose ranks swelled in the 1990s and quickly subsided in the early 2000s, soon after the dot-com bubble burst and many companies started outsourcing computer-programming jobs abroad.
In contrast, economics and business majors ranked among the five most desirable majors in a 2004 survey of employers by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, along with accounting, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. It wasn't just banks and insurance companies that expressed interest in economics majors--companies in industries such as utilities and retailing did so, too.
Like many people whose eyes glaze over at a supply-and-demand curve, Nicholas Rendler, a 19-year-old student at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, says he finds economics boring. But he has gravitated to the topic anyway: He chose a major combining economics, sociology, and anthropology because he thinks economics is crucial to understanding the world.
"Economics can be very frustrating, but it is the world we are currently operating in and we need the basic framework," he says. Roberto Angulo, chief executive of AfterCollege Inc., a San Francisco online recruiting service with 267,000 registered users, says an economics major has practical job value. "Students are more employable if they study economics," he says. He graduated from Stanford University with an economics degree five years ago.
It isn't just the job calculus that is drawing students to the major: It also is the rapid spread of economic globalization. Many students around the world are wondering what effect global economic trends will have on them.
Foreign students studying in the United States are flocking to the major. Sabrina De Abreu, a student from Argentina about to start her senior year at Harvard, says her country's experiences made her choice easy. "When I grew up in Argentina, my country plunged into a recession," she says. "Understanding economics has become a fundamental part of my life."
Indeed, the rising popularity of the economics major appears to be a global phenomenon. A recent McKinsey Global Institute study found that the share of degrees in economics and business awarded in Poland from 1996 to 2002 more than doubled, to 36 percent from 16 percent; in Russia, the share jumped to 31 percent from 18 percent.
John Sutton, chairman of the economics department at London School of Economics, says the school's popularity is at an all-time high, in part due to interest from eastern Europe. Dr. Sutton says that as these countries undergo capitalist changes, "bright young students are beginning to see economic issues highlighted."
This article is reprinted by permission from CareerJournal.com, The Wall Street Journal career information site, © 2006, Dow Jones & Co. Inc. All rights reserved.
Today's Thoughts from others...
A letter from Ron Paul - September 22, 2008
Dear Friends:
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."
Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,
Ron Paul
What is your political philosophy ? Take the World's Smallest Political Quiz to find out..
So, your answers indicate you might be a Libertarian. What does that mean?
"Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to his life in any way he chooses so long as he or she respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person's right to life, liberty and property-rights that people have naturally, before governments are created. In the Libertarian view, all human relationships should be voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves uses force-actions like murder, robbery, rape, kidnapping and fraud."
According to Charles Murray, What it Means to Be a Libertarian, Broadway Books, 1997
For more on Libertarianism log onto any of the following websites:
http://www.libertarianism.com/
http://www.libertarianism.org/
http://www.theihs.org/libertyguide/
http://www.cato.org/dailys/01-01-99.html
Cartoons!!
