A great deal of seemingly dead-serious conflict is occurring in the USA (and other countries). Trumpers versus Bidenistas; lockdowners versus anti-lockdowners; pro-abortionists versus anti-abortionists; and so forth.
Author: Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.
Why People Espouse Anarchy
WHY PEOPLE ESPOUSE THE STATE: Because they believe that anarchy won’t work or because they are evil.
Police Hypothesis
Hypothesis 1: Police are constrained by laws enacted by legislatures and upheld by courts. That’s a major reason why laws and court decisions are important in defending a free society.
An Arm of The State
Imagine an ostensibly independent source of information, constantly bombarding the public, that ceaselessly fans the fires of fear and group hatred. Could anything be of greater use to the government as it seeks to mislead and thus control people?
Shouting Matches Between Nincompoops
Go back fifty years or so, and you can find news that was, to some extent, actually news: you know, more or less factual answers to the classic journalistic questions: what, who, when, where, and how. I’m not sure exactly when the change happened, but at some point the news became entertainment.
Not One Opponent Would I Kill
Many people have killed — sometimes a few, sometimes millions — in order to put their ideology in the saddle. I am deeply invested in my ideology; I have great confidence in its coherence and its foundational values; I have little doubt that if it were to become a society’s reigning belief system the members of that society would reap enormous benefits.
Constricting Social Cooperation
The COVID-19 pandemic and, especially, the actions governments have taken in response to it have been, both directly and indirectly, enormously destructive of life, liberty, and wealth. But another tremendously significant aspect of these terrible events has been the lapse into what we might call ideological insanity on both sides of the lockdown divide.
Wholly Selfish Reasons
Progressives are not all alike, of course, but this much they appear overwhelmingly to have in common: they believe that people like them should run the world.
Responsible Rulers
I have often heard people charge libertarian anarchists with being irresponsible for wishing to get rid of the current system of government and replace it with genuine self-governance. It’s as if — however difficult it may be to believe — these critics actually believe that rulers in the current setup are responsible.
Commies All the Way Down
As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, “The theory of Communism may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”