Roy Cordato

Senior Economist and Resident Scholar
Roy Cordato is Senior Economist and Resident Scholar at the John Locke Foundation. From January 2001 to March 2017, he held the position of Vice President for Research at the Locke Foundation. He is also an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Economics at North Carolina State University where he teaches “Political Economy of the Market Process,” a course that he designed. In addition, he is faculty advisor for the Austrian Economics Forum and the Society for Politics, Economics, and the Law, both at N.C. State University.

From 1993-2000 Cordato served as the Lundy Professor of Business Philosophy at Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C. From 1987 to 1993 he was Senior Economist at the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation (IRET) in Washington, D.C. He has served as full-time economics faculty at the University of Hartford and at Auburn University and as adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University. His publications include a 1992 book, Welfare Economics and Externalities in an Open Ended Universe (Kluwer Academic Publishers republished in 2007 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute).

His articles have appeared in a number of economics journals and law reviews in addition to The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, The Journal of Commerce, The Congressional Record, The Orange County Register, The Freeman, Human Events, National Review Online, The Washington Examiner, Tax Notes and many other newspapers and magazines. In 2000 he received the Freedoms Foundation’s Leavey Award in Free Enterprise Education. He is also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and former executive board member of The Association of Private Enterprise Education. Cordato holds an M.A. in urban and regional economics from the University of Hartford and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. He also holds a Bachelors of Music Education from the Hartt School of Music.

Posts by Roy Cordato (page 1)

  • NC’s full employment means Amazon would be stealing workers not creating jobs

    Today’s Carolina Journal’s “Daily Journal” features an important article by my colleague Jon Sanders on Amazon’s attempt to fleece North Carolina’s taxpayers in soliciting an unprecedented incentive package, i.e. bribe, from the State. If Governor Cooper and NC’s always-anxious-to-extend-the-corporate-gravy train legislature, hands over the booty Amazon wants, the corporate…
    Roy Cordato, September 22, 2017

  • Price Gouging Laws

    This is an excerpt from two different sections of North Carolina’s Price Control Laws: Harming Those They are Meant to Help, a monograph that I wrote for the Locke Foundation over a decade ago. It’s relevance to the current moment should be obvious. North Carolina’s Price Gouging Law—Prices Too High North…
    Roy Cordato, August 27, 2017

  • Some things never change

    Ludwig von Mises writing in 1923. Marxism had placed a strict prohibition on any preoccupation with the problems of the socialist social and economic system…Socialism had to be praised but not thought about.
    Roy Cordato, August 14, 2017

  • MRI–NC wait times vs Ontario Canada

    I was just scheduled for a non-emergency MRI three days after it was ordered. Checked to see what the story would have been for the same thing if I were living in Ontario where free healthcare is a “right”–38 to 250 days depending on the hospital, with most people…
    Roy Cordato, August 8, 2017

  • When y’all means none of y’all

    My guess is that the irony totally escapes the owners of this establishment.
    Roy Cordato, June 29, 2017

  • Look no further than film incentives, solar subsidies, and the recent vote on craft freedom

    From Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, 1949, pp. 865-866. (To understand this passage in terms of the Orwellian language that dominates modern politics in North Carolina and elsewhere substitute the word stakeholders for Mises’ use of the phrase “pressure groups.”) The public looks askance upon the lobbyists and blames…
    Roy Cordato, May 19, 2017

  • Trade policy should be about consumers

    This is an open letter from my friend Professor Don Boudreaux at George Mason University to Congressman Sherrod Brown of Ohio, published at Professor Boudreaux’s popular Cafe’ Hayek blog (Emphasis is mine). It makes a very important and usually missed point about trade and trade policy. “Mr.
    Roy Cordato, May 18, 2017

  • Norman B. Ture’–A true understanding of supply side economics

    As the late Dr. Norman Ture’, one of the founding fathers of modern supply side economics explains, what most people, even many economists, don’t understand is that supply side economics is a methodological approach to answering certain kinds of questions in economics. These are primarily questions related to the…
    Roy Cordato, May 16, 2017