Do you notice a pattern when dealing with any aspect of the government at nearly any level? We all have. Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably waste your time, annoy you and attack your dignity, and finally just prove to be totally ineffective at accomplishing the task, there’s a good chance that it involves the government. This is one of the most persistent and yet least acknowledged features of modern life.
Tag: police
Shan Gao, Huangdi Yuan
Some folks believe that we can’t possibly have liberty unless we somehow push a button and make all governments vanish. But why limit our imagination to those stifled and over-governed experiences which most of us in “developed” countries have inured ourselves?
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.
Someone, not Santa, is Always Watching
A paper recently published by a professor in Canada suggests that the popular “Elf on the Shelf” game is conditioning children to accept the surveillance state. The notion of the Elf on the Shelf is that a small elf doll is actually a scout elf who reports nightly to Santa Claus on the activities that occur in his house. Parents are supposed to reinforce this story by relocating the elf each night so that his journey and return seem more plausible.
Debunking Common Government Claims
It’s very rare to have parking bureaucrats respond to our defense with anything other than a curt, “DENIED”. So when I got the following from a friend I was really surprised. Not surprised at the content, just because there was a detailed response at all. Since it’s full of fallacies, and short of evidence, I thought it worthwhile to debunk.
Satanic Ritual Abuse?
Although it hasn’t yet reached the mainstream, there appears to be a growing resurgence of the panic and fear mongering of the 1980s regarding the thoroughly debunked claims of “satanic ritual abuse” and widespread kidnapping for such purposes. If you are seeing this trend too, please help to counter such fantastical claims with logic and truth.
So-Called Intellectual Property
Property ownership is central to liberty and civilization. Property rights prevent conflict over the use of scarce resources. Ironically, the term “intellectual property” (aka “IP”) represents a hodgepodge of concepts that generally introduce artificial scarcity and needless conflict.
There are No Good Cops… or Cop Defenders
Faced with the avalanche of despicable and unrelenting boot-licking propaganda from the John Birch Society (JBS) and its local disciples, you might believe that cops were not 53 times more deadly to Americans than terrorism. You might believe that 960 Americans had not already been slaughtered by the American Gestapo in 2016. You might even believe that being a cop was an unusually dangerous job. You might believe these things… but you would be incorrect on all counts.
Why Would Anyone Want a President?
Apart from employees of the executive branch, or active-duty members of the military who have been called into service by Congress, no American really has a “president.” The office was intended to be peripheral to the daily concerns of Americans, rather than the central focus of their existence. What a wonderful thing it would be if Americans of all persuasions adopted the motto “Not My President” – and then learned to regard the state itself with the proper mixture of hostility and contempt.
The Trouble With Politics
Politics is of its very nature is biased in favor of intervention and planning. Even in its “minarchist” or “night-watchman” version, politics is based at root on the idea that some decisions must be made coercively and imposed on unwilling minorities – or even majorities, as the case may be. This is contrary to the principle we observe in private life every day: the consent of both parties is necessary for a transaction to take place.