Advocates for big government often equate expanding government with concern for the poor. But reality speaks to the contrary: Expanding government often has very harmful effects on the poor.
Tag: intervention
Why Our Coercive System of Schooling Should Topple
I’ve been called a crazy optimist, a Pollyanna, a romantic idealist. How can I believe that our system of compulsory schooling is about to collapse? People point out that in many ways the schooling system is stronger now than ever. It occupies more of children’s time, gobbles up more public funds, employs more people, and is more firmly controlled by government – and at ever-higher levels of government – than has ever been true in the past. So why do I believe it’s going to collapse – slowly at first and then more rapidly – over the next ten years or so? Here are four reasons.
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.
A Voluntaryist Begins The Proust Questionnaire
I recently encountered the Proust Questionnaire. It is a regular feature in “Vanity Fair” magazine, where it is answered by a guest celebrity. When I got about halfway through I thought, “Voila! This would be a good architecture for an interview with a very objective voluntaryist.”
There is Only One Way to Save Our City
While many of my friends and colleagues wait in hope of “reform”, I’ll continue my quest to change the world by investing my voice and my votes in an entrepreneurial theory of social change. While the world at large insists on celebrating and fearing great leaders, I will celebrate the power of the individual as expressed through innovation and voluntary interaction in the marketplace.
Childhood is a Lifelong Burden
You have to forgive those who reared you so you can move forward and decide, on your own terms, what kind of person you are going to be. Then they cease to matter.
Defending a Free Nation
Most societies, at least in this century, handle the problem of national defense by having a large, well-armed, permanent military force, run by a centralized government, funded by taxation, and often (though not always) manned by conscription. Is this a solution that a free nation can or should follow?
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.
What Does It Mean To Be Pro-Choice?
On March 7th, 2017, the U.S. Libertarian Party asked the public to vote, via donation, for the theme of the 2018 Libertarian National Convention. Among them is one that is causing quite a commotion in the party. “Pro Choice on Everything!”