The question is not whether the market should be regulated, but who should regulate it. And the only two choices are: 1) market participants through the exercise of their free and peaceful choices or 2) politicians and bureaucrats relying on the threat of violence to impose their will.
Category: The Goal is Freedom
How to Spite Putin
I have an idea. It’s so clever and foolproof that I’m surprised no one in the ruling elite and its mass media has thought of it. We can yank the rug out from under that dastardly Putin, and he’ll never bother us again.
The American Way of War
Contrary to popular misconception, the war state did not begin in 1945. From the start, war was an acceptable means to national policy ends, whether to open markets or to install friendly regimes. It’s a gross understatement to call this record shameful.
The Debate Over Taxation Cannot Be Value-Free
When anyone calls for a new tax or a tax increase, what that person wants is for government personnel to threaten force against anyone who fails to surrender his or her money to the state. But almost no one speaks in those terms. If tax advocates did that, their rhetoric at least would be honest (and only in that sense noble.) Instead, such people engage in base rhetoric.
Talk to, Don’t Provoke, North Korea
There’s little more we can do than hope that some cool heads around Donald Trump are telling him he’d be nuts to attack North Korea. I don’t know who they might be. Still, we must hope.
What a Perverse Presidential Incentive System!
All I can say is, we’ve got a hell of a political system on our hands when the surest way for a president to win the adoration of those who thought him a dangerous, ignorant, narcissistic, erratic, and bullshitting blowhard yesterday is to drop a bomb or fire a cruise missile today.
What is Fascism?
As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.
Things to Keep in Mind During the Health Care Debate
Politicians, of course, can declare a right to medical care, but those are mere words. What counts is what happens after the declaration. Since a system in which everyone could have, on demand, all the medical care they wanted at no cost would be unsustainable, the so-called right to medical care necessarily translates into the power of politicians and bureaucrats to set the terms under which medical services and products may be provided and received.
The Religion of the State
Many objects have been turned into totems, but among the most common are flags, which are emblems signifying an association with a group and a cause taken to be larger than any individual. There’s hardly a need to point out how the flag is venerated in the United States — especially these days.
Trump Assumes Command of the American Church
As Donald Trump demonstrated in his first address to Congress, no matter how loathsome a ruler may be, he can bring an assembly of politicians to its feet and disarm some critics simply by invoking the quasi-secular faith — Americanism — and eulogizing the latest uniformed war-state employee to sacrifice his life for it. Trump has indeed shown he can fill the job expected of any president: supreme head of what Andrew Bacevich calls the Church of America the Redeemer.