Ask yourself this: even if you make less than your parents, would you go back in time to the world they lived in when they were your current age even with their higher real money income? My guess is no, and that’s the most powerful evidence that whatever your income, you perceive yourself as better off today than they were then.
Tag: poverty
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.
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.
Economic Localism Is No Better than Economic Nationalism
As Black Friday has continued to expand in recent years, one response to its orgy of discounts and deals has been to promote the following day as “Small Business Saturday.” The idea is to encourage people to shop at their local stores rather than at national chains or big-box stores, or perhaps on the Internet. Doing so, argue its proponents, is both moral and good for the local economy, as it keeps jobs and money in “our communities” rather than, presumably, in the hands of faceless and distant corporate masters.
On Social Progress
Social progress. The true sense of the phrase is ennobling. Make no mistake, if there is to be a leap in human evolution, social progress is the requisite precursor. I long to see an era of broad, lasting social progress.
Maybe Anarchism is Capitalism and Communism
Maybe anarchism, the political philosophy of rulerless society, is capitalism and communism. Hear me out.
From One Extreme To The Next
Even as the ideas between the statist and anti-statist are exchanged, those who advocate for more government continue to have the jackboot thug on their side, and no give and take is truly present. What’s an anarchist to do?
The Buy Local Fallacy
Advocates of the “buy local” movement claim doing so betters the local economy. The economics and reasoning behind this claim are misguided at best. Here are three areas the locavore’s rationale is wrong.
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.
The State is a Tool, for Justice?
What this conversation and exploration of this social Democrat’s ideas and thought processes taught me was that the issue for most people is not a moral or ethical one. It’s an economic one. What the world is missing is sufficient understanding of economic law and logic.