Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean , December 28, 2008 Government hand is harmful by Richard J. Grant , Ph.D. Civilization advances with people learning to achieve more with less work. For any item that we now purchase, we spend less time working to earn it than our parents and grandparents did. Our economic advancement necessarily meant changing how we did things. But it did not require us to change our values, the essentials of respect for people and their property. Not even when the going got tough. Why now is our government telling us to reverse that — to change our values and to keep doing the same jobs we did before? When they tell us that "markets don't work anymore," they are telling us that we need government to tell us what to do. They are telling us that they know better than we do what to do with our property. They will take our property from us to "create jobs," create work for us. Past promises unfulfilled Do you believe them? Did the government invent ca...

Published in The Tennessean , October 23, 2008 Government has caused this panic By Richard J. Grant Are you worried about your portfolio allocations? Are you worried about the value of your home? Then you should worry about the value of your home's home. If you live near me, that means the USA. It seems fairly easy to teach people how to handle their portfolios. But many still panic when the markets turn down, and they suffer for it. By contrast, it is far more difficult to teach people how to take care of their country. But when they panic at election time, we all suffer. Too many people believe all the current nonsense about "market failure" or the "failure of capitalism." Educational failure would be closer to the mark. The cause of the current financial panic is the many years of government interference in our businesses and private lives. At best, when government takes our resources, it gives us services worth about half what the private sector would have g...

Published in The Tennessean , September 23, 2008 Government handouts cost more in long run By RICHARD J. GRANT In every country where government has tried to run the economy, the results have been poverty and oppression. Do our political leaders believe they can do better? They have done many dumb things on our behalf and, as a result, we are poorer and less free than we could, and should, be. By world standards, we are still the biggest and most powerful. But that is to damn ourselves with faint praise. The world can overtake us if we forget who we are. Many Americans have forgotten, or never learned, that U.S. prosperity grew in a historic oasis of economic freedom, constitutionally preserved by the Founding Fathers. And prosperity will fade away when our freedoms are taken away. When politicians pander to the most gullible among us by offering "bailouts" and "stimulus" packages, we must know that the deal is rigged against us. In seeking something for nothing, we...

Published in The Tennessean , April 25, 2008 Excessive government created vicious cycle By RICHARD J. GRANT The current "global food crisis" is not a crisis in its own right. It is a symptom of a broader intellectual crisis that has spawned a vicious cycle of increasing government intervention, here and abroad. Excessive and poorly conceived government regulations, taxes and subsidies have created a cluster of crises, and now the fluctuating prices will be used as an excuse to increase government meddling even further. We could start by looking at extreme cases, such as Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe has liberated his country from the status of net agricultural exporter and turned it into an aid-dependent exporter of hungry people. That's what you can do with just the right mix of bad economic policies and corrupt political practices. Third World governance begat and maintains our current portfolio of Third World countries. With a little more effort we, too, could achieve ...