This “wage slavery” argument is very convincing. It is potent because all human beings already accept that every one of us is, indeed, compelled to work (in one sense of the word) until one has enough wealth. The “thing” that compels people to work, is reality. No one, not even the richest man, can escape the fact that, if one just consumes and consumes resources without doing anything productive, one will eventually starve and die. This circumstance of reality applies to everyone.
Tag: wealth
5 Ways To Think Like a State
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.
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…
Black Friday Is The Crowning Achievement Of Capitalism
Many people enjoy looking down upon other people who choose to partake in the Black Friday sales. This is a tragic reflection of supercilious conceit that some who earn more currency have for those who earn less. It is an unnecessary and thoroughly harmful abhorrence of those who seek to enrich their lives through purchasing…
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.
Monetary System: Currency vs. Money, & Hyperinflation
Natural currency is that which is chosen by free and peaceful people to interact in. It is chosen because it has been demonstrated to be of superior value as compared with currencies of the past. The value of currency is its ability to lubricate transactions and facilitate trade. When it no longer effectively serves this function it must and will be summarily abandoned and replaced with a better alternative.
Thank You, Donald Trump
We advocates of liberty owe Donald Trump a great debt of gratitude. Thanks to Trump it is clearer than ever that most people who call themselves conservatives, and not just those who have lined up with Trump, are no cousins of ours. Freedom is not on their list of priorities. Neither is free enterprise. Nor civil liberties. And I need not mention war, peace, and empire.
Words Poorly Used #72: Oligarchy
I got in trouble last month for using the term “oligarchy” in, admittedly, a pejorative sense. Here’s what I wrote on Facebook: “No matter how one votes tomorrow, the winner will be oligarchy A or oligarchy B (where A = B).” Very good friends called me to task for this logic fallacy, justifiably so since I had committed several logic fallacies, the worst of which was the fallacy of begging the question. My premises assumed their own truth without establishment. Is the USA really run by an oligarchy?