• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

19. Ibid.

20. John Gibbons, “I Can’t Get No … Job Satisfaction,” The Conference Board, January 2010.

21. See the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program website (http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/) for more information.

22. For wealth inequality, see Office of Management and Budget, “A New Era of Responsibility,” February 2009, p. 9. For income inequality, see Gerald Prante and Mark Robyn, “Fiscal Fact: Summary of Latest Federal Income Tax Data,” Tax Foundation, October 6, 2010.

23. See Robert Innes and Arnab Mitra, “Is Dishonesty Contagious?,” June 2009, and the references therein.

24. Goldman Sachs settlement: Patricia Hurtado and Christine Harper, “SEC Settlement with Goldman Sachs for $550 Million Approved by US Judge,” Bloomberg News, July 21, 2010. Goldman Sachs 2009 income: Goldman Sachs website. Countrywide: Alex Dobuzinskis, “Mozilo Settles Countrywide Fraud Case at $67.5 million,” Reuters News, October 15, 2010. Angelo Mozilo net worth: Kamelia Angelova, “Worst CEOs Ever: Angelo Mozilo,” Business Insider, June 8, 2009.

Chapter 3: The Free-Market Fallacy

1. Jeffrey Sachs and Michael Bruno, Economics of Worldwide Stagflation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Book 1, Chapter 2.

3. Specifically, once the market equilibrium is reached, there is no possible further adjustment of resources (for example, as mandated by the government) that could raise living standards for some part of the population without at the same time making some other part worse off. This notion of efficiency is called “Pareto efficiency.”

4. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 36.

5. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 5, Section 1.

6. Efficiency should be measured in terms of goods and services of true value to consumers. A rise in the gross national product (GNP) is not enough to prove that efficiency is higher, since GNP may include market transactions that don’t really raise well-being (such as those based on fraud, pollution, or a decline in nonmarket services such as leisure time).

7. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987–2009,” May 21, 2009.

8. Forbes, “The World’s Billionaires,” 2011.

9. The army, police, prisons, and courts constitute the so-called night watchman functions of government. Pure libertarians champion a night watchman state, one that limits its activities to the core tasks of protecting private property, personal security, and national security.

10. Gallup Poll, “Views of Income Taxes Among Most Positive Since 1956,” April 13, 2009.

11. Pew Research Center, “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987–2009,” p. 43.

12. The main exceptions in history are when one ethnic, racial, or religious group leaves another to perish.

13. See responses to similar questions and topics in Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, Class War: What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

14. Only a small proportion of poor children today will make it through college unless there is a drastic change in U.S. social and education policy. The disadvantages confronting poor children are too powerful and too many. Poor children grow up with poor neighborhoods, poor health, and poor schools, with parents of low educational attainment who cannot adequately help their children to succeed in school, and in the case of minorities, with the low expectations by the rest of society and with continuing discrimination and racism.

The end result is a startlingly strong correlation in America between the parents’ educational attainment and income and their children’s educational attainment and income. Households that have made it through college and to affluence are likely to raise their children to