It may easily be foreseen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labor without ceasing to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to wield those powers. … Centralization will be the natural government.” -Alexis De Tocquivelle (“Democracy in America”) And here …
At the heart of economics is a scientific mystery: How is it that the pricing system accomplishes the world’s work without anyone being in charge? Like language, no one invented it. None of us could have invented it, and its operation depends in no way on anyone’s comprehension or understanding of it. Somehow, it is …
Students now leave campus largely prepped by their professors to embrace a predictable menu: the glories of larger government, income redistribution, greater entitlements, radical environmentalism, abortion, multiculturalism, suspicion of traditional religion, and antipathy to the international role of the United States in the past and present. -Prof. Victor Davis Hanson (Indoctrination, not education) And Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez …
Market economies and market reforms look better as more weight is placed on the relatively distant future. A free society is better today than a corrupt and totalitarian one. But one hundred years from now, the difference in human welfare and other relevant values will prove far more pronounced. -Tyler Cowen (Stubborn Attachments)
From The Long March of Socialism – Do Not Keep Faith ..Socialists are good at hacking the human emotional landscape, so to speak. As I stated in an earlier post, the nature of this moral argument stems from a misinterpretation of the Golden Rule, or alternatively, from the optimum play strategy in Game Theory. In …
I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. -Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States (H/T: The Truth About Guns)
For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in …
The elite wanted a world without God and they got it. Andrew Sullivan argues that with the decline of traditional religions the godless world has embraced political cults. They are finding the resulting world an uncongenial place. Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. …
Our strongest obligations are to contribute to sustainable economic growth and to support the general spread of civilization, rather than to engage in massive charitable redistribution in the narrower sense. In the longer run, greater economic growth and a more stable civilization will help the poor most of all. -Tyler Cowan ( Stubborn Attachments) The highest …
Once a governmental program is instituted, a specific clientele is born, with clearly defined interests in both the maintenance and expansion of the program’s benefits. These interests make themselves felt politically, with the familiar concentration of pressures toward expansion as opposed to the dissipated opposition reflected in the generality of the taxes used to finance …
