MicroGroks
Warning against “monopoly fatalism,” the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne says: Time was, the A&P grocery chain was the entrenched “Amazon of its day,” with almost 15,000 stores by 1935. Seen one recently? Between 1976 and 1978, the government worried that IBM might have a monopoly on the “office typewriter industry.” A November 2007 Forbes cover …
Notable Quote: Nothing lasts forever – especially monopolies Read More »
Just as the Founders considered and created a Constitution that would guarantee the Separation of Powers, the philosophy behind it was to set up bulwarks to deny people the ability to aggregate power unto themselves and their special interests.
Our Founders wanted a limited Government constrained by the Constitution. But if our elected Representatives refuse to even talk about the Constitution’s limitations upon them, how can it be limited?
Can a federal government that acknowledges no limits to its scope, and that responds promiscuously to the multiplying appetites of proliferating factions, make choices that serve the society’s long-term interests? The answer, based on the avalanche of evidence from current governance, is an emphatic “no.” The evidence is in the rise of the administrative state …
Notable Quote – George Will, Prof. Don Boudreaux Read More »
The Declaration is not just chronologically prior to the Constitution, it is logically prior. As Timothy Sandefur writes, the Declaration “sets the framework for reading” the Constitution, so it is the Constitution’s “conscience”: By the terms with which the Declaration articulates the Constitution’s purpose – the purpose is to “secure” unalienable rights – the Declaration intimates …
[Welfare] states presuppose economic dynamism sufficient to generate investments, job creation, corporate profits, and individuals’ incomes from which come tax revenues needed to fund entitlements. But welfare states produce in citizens an entitlement mentality and a low pain threshold. That mentality inflames appetites for more entitlements, broadly construed to include all government benefits and protections …
Notable Quote – George Will, Prof. Don Boudreaux Read More »
[Welfare] states presuppose economic dynamism sufficient to generate investments, job creation, corporate profits, and individuals’ incomes from which come tax revenues needed to fund entitlements. But welfare states produce in citizens an entitlement mentality and a low pain threshold. That mentality inflames appetites for more entitlements, broadly construed to include all government benefits and protections …
The political class has prospered by hiding from the public the cost of the public’s appetites. By making vast deficit spending not an occasional counter-cyclical recourse but a constant governing strategy, it has made big government deceptively cheap, giving today’s public a dollar’s worth of goods and services and charging them only about 80 cents. …
Note a contradiction in progressivism that has become steadily more severe in the century since [Woodrow] Wilson wrote. Progressivism has no objection to steady enlargement of the “conceptions of state duty.” Quite the contrary, such enlargement is the progressive agenda – the expansion of the central government’s supervision of society’s complexities. But as solicitous government permeates society …
Modernity’s gift has been the ability and determination to sharply delineate private and public spheres, with the private being the zone of individual sovereignty. It is the realm of the household, the family, and the work that sustains both. This is the basis of the proposition that the Constitution of the first consciously modern nation, …
Notable Quote – George Will and Prof. Don Boudreaux Read More »
