Dominating and Bullying

November 25, 2020 Robert Higgs

Government officials, who purport to know what is good for us better than we do, are rarely content simply to advise us of this superior knowledge and recommend that we act in its light. Instead they nearly always order us to act or to refrain from acting as they think best and threaten us with violent retribution if we fail to conform. This is not the way of people who care about us, but the way of people who relish dominating and bullying us.

Written by 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.