Will entrepreneurship flourish in Cuba, and will it bring the same increases in the quality of life as elsewhere in the world? I am cautiously optimistic.
Author: Editor's Pick
Selected content picked by the editor of Everything-Voluntary.com.
Taxation Isn’t Only Theft, It’s Destruction
Where the state is, there also is the growth of the state. Why does a state’s scope enlarge? One theory is that interest groups seek to use the state’s taxing power for their own benefit. I would like to suggest a complementary theory. When the power to tax is conferred upon rulers, many harmful incentives necessarily are conveyed with it. These encourage the rulers to expand their destructive acts.
How Work Became Drudgery Once Again
Young people, college graduates especially, are not feeling hopeful about their careers. Mired in student loan debt, facing a labor market that has been stagnant for as long as they can remember, and deciding between a job where they’ll be miserable and moving back in with their parents, millennials have grown skeptical toward market capitalism. Yet, if they looked at the history of the matter, they would be amazed how far we’ve strayed from a free market in labor in the past century. Their plight is not due to economic freedom, but to a century of centralized efforts to regiment and regulate the labor market and the very mind and soul of the worker.
The Trouble With Socialist Anarchism
Written by Per Bylund. The new movie “V for Vendetta” has provoked public discussion of the meaning of anarchism. Murray Rothbard was an advocate of the stateless society, but he was never accepted by the anarchist movement and is still considered more a “capitalist lackey” than anarchist thinker. Indeed, anarcho-capitalism has always been considered an…
Compulsory Education
Everyone loves learning. The thing is that not everyone likes studying and what’s even more frustrating is to be told how we should study, why we should study etc. Making education available to everyone is benevolent but making education compulsory for everyone is something that we are so used to that we do not see the blatant problem with it – the deprivation of freedom that prevents the flourishing of precisely those who have the most potential in society; children.
Teaching vs. Indoctrinating Your Children
What is the difference between teaching and indoctrinating? It’s a question that we don’t often think too deeply about, because the answer feels pretty obvious. It’s something bad that other people do to teach children falsehood before they know any better. Teaching is concerned with truth, and indoctrination is concerned with ridiculous dogma. But from an objective perspective, it’s hard to tell who is doing the indoctrinating and who isn’t.
David Hume on Self-Coordinating and Correcting Market Processes
David Hume emphasized that commerce and trade were among the most important avenues to offer opportunities to raise people’s standards of living, and to bring refinement and cultural betterment to a growing portion of a nation’s population.
How Government Regulation Makes Us Poorer
Oftentimes people, including so-called experts, compare apples and oranges by looking at data “before” and “after” an event, for instance, when discussing the effects of raising the minimum wage. So they might say that employment before was similar to after the hike, and then conclude that the change had no effect. But this is wrong, because there are plenty of changes in the economy that took place between the before and after — not only the minimum wage. So in order to figure out the effect of the minimum wage specifically, we must compare the “after” situation with what would have been had there been no minimum wage hike — the unseen.
Why We Need Less Politics and More Private Governance
We’ve lived through another election season, and this year, as with every years, the candidates competed to tell us about all the ways they were going to use the power of government to make our lives better. Unfortunately, many voters appeared quite sympathetic to the idea that government action can improve living standards and generally make markets work better. That’s the bad news. But, there are also trends at work right now that are bigger than any single election cycle, and while the candidates this year provided little reason for optimism, the voters themselves may be growing skeptical of just how much the government can solve all their problems. Nevertheless, one of the most important things we can do is really explain and understand how markets, and not government intervention, are our best hope for an orderly and prosperous society.
“Buying Local” Is as Senseless as “Buying Tall”
Many advocates of “buying local” insist that buying local is good for the local economy and, hence, economically good for each person in the local economy. For a number of reasons, the economics on which the “buy local” movement rests is remarkably weak.