From the time of Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" through the Great Depression, American towns and cities sought to lure footloose companies by offering lavish benefits. These ranged from taxpayer-financed factories, to tax exemptions, to outright gifts of money. This kind of government aid, known as "corporate welfare," is still around today. After establishing its historical foundations, James T. Bennett reveals four modern manifestations.His first case is the epochal debate...

This book presents an absorbing study of how educational radio, which originated to broadcast weather forecasts to farmers, has become what the Pew Center calls the most trusted source of news for American liberals and a regular in the rogue's gallery of election-year conservative targets.The Nielsen Company reported in late 2019 that 272 million Americans listen to "traditional radio" each week, a number exceeding those who watch television, use a smartphone, or access the Interne...

In this eye-opening book, Professor James Bennett guides readers through centuries of one of the most underrated yet widely used aspects of American life—roads.Relying on history and economic data—and with a humorous and oftentimes sharp tongue—Bennett explains how important America's highways and byways have been to everything from policymaking to everyday life. Crafting America's roads took persuasion, planning—and more taxes than any politician could have dreame...

A direct consequence of the War on Terror launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001 is an awareness of the need for homeland security. This war is being used to justify a huge expansion of government powers and spending, but funds allocated for homeland security are often for programs far removed from anything that might be termed defense or security. In Homeland Security Scams, James T. Bennett shows that this government spending is doing very little to make us safer, but a great d...

They Play, You Pay is a detailed, sometimes irreverent look at a political conundrum: despite evidence that publicly funded ballparks, stadiums, and arenas do not generate net economic growth, governments keep on taxing sales, restaurant patrons, renters of automobiles, and hotel visitors in order to build ever more elaborate cathedrals of professional sport—often in order to satisfy an owner who has threatened to move his team to greener, more subsidy‑happy, pastures. This book i...

A study of the long-term decline of the labour movement in America, exploring the outlook for labour and unions in the 21st century. There are insights from contributors from a range of backgrounds - academic and non-academic, domestic and foreign, pro- and anti-union.

This book examines the history, politics, and economics of alternative energy. Since the energy crisis of the 1970s, governments around the world have subsidized and otherwise incentivized alternative forms of energy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. This search has taken on added urgency in the twenty-first century, as the specter of climate change has engendered ambitious state-level renewable portfolio standards, enhanced federal incentives, and inspired “100% renewable” electrical ...

One of the best-known and most-quoted books ever written on labor unions is What Do Unions Do? by Richard Freeman and James Medoff. Published in 1984, the book proved to be a landmark because it provided the most comprehensive and statistically sophisticated empirical portrait of the economic and socio-political effects of unions, and a provocative conclusion that unions are on balance beneficial for the economy and society.The present volume represents a twentieth-anniversary retrospectiv...

Not Invited to the Party demonstrates how the dominant political parties--the Democrats and Republicans--have co-opted the system to their advantage. James Bennett examines the history and array of laws, regulations, subsidies and programs that benefit the two major parties and discourage even the possibility of a serious challenge to the Democrat-Republican duopoly. The American Founders, as it has been generally forgotten, distrusted political parties. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution ar...

In the American mind, state subsidization of writers and artists was long associated with monarchies and, in later years, socialist states. The support these regimes gave to intellectuals was understood to come with a cost, yet, beginning with the New Deal's Federal Writers', Art, and Theater Projects, a new policy consensus asserted that by offering financial support to the arts, the federal government was affirming their importance to the nation.Subsidizing Culture examines the developme...

What does a nation owe its military veterans? Gratitude, esteem, land grants, medical care, pensions, higher education? Or is serving in the armed forces of one’s country an obligation to be undertaken without any expectation of compensation? If veterans are to receive government aid, should a distinction be made between those who served in wartime or faced enemy fire and those who saw neither war nor combat?These questions have been answered in varying ways by the American people ...

What do drivers' licenses that function as national ID cards, nationwide standardized tests for third graders, the late unlamented 55 mile per hour speed limit, the outlawing of the eighteen-year-old beer drinker, and the disappearing mechanical lever voting machine have in common? Each is the product of an unfunded federal mandate: a concept that politicians of both parties profess to oppose in theory but which in practice they often find irresistible as a means of forcing state and local...