Alongside of Catholicism and Protestantism, the primary religion in the United States is not Islam or Judaism but the American civic religion. The Pledge of Allegiance is the creed of this religion and the American flag is its chief symbol. In the American civic religion, the worst sin that an American can commit is to refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag or to desecrate it. Federal law contains numerous provisions regarding the use, handling, display, and disposal of the flag. After some college students recently burned American flags on their campuses, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”
Category: Editor’s Picks
Entrepreneurship in Cuba
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.
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…
Trump’s Tactic Is Certain to Create Regime Uncertainty
The president’s actions might capture media attention and create the impression that he is going to bat to protect threatened jobs, but the visible effects of such random blundering about will be tiny in comparison with the far-reaching effects on corporate managers and owners across the board, because such selective intervention in the details of companies’ operations epitomizes the kind of action by which governments create what I have called regime uncertainty—a pervasive fear that existing private property rights in one’s property and the income the property yields will be attenuated or destroyed by unpredictable changes in government taxation, regulation, or other action.
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.