News – Politics – Opinion – Podcasts
…This system of prices and wages conveys reasonably reliable information to each individual about the consequences that will be experienced not only by her, but also by other people – most of them complete strangers – as a result of her choice of how to use her resources.
The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the global shift already underway towards a neo-feudal society. With the middle-class economy largely shut down and, in the best-case scenario, in for a long and painful recovery, the population that is barely hanging on is expanding rapidly in America and around the world.
Higgs sees government, as usual, vastly expanding during the crisis, and he’s sure that it will not shrink back to its former scale once the crisis is over. It never does, as he famously documented in his 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, and in later works exploring this … Read more
Freedom of exchange and production within a regime of private property rights and freedom of contract harnesses self-interest to the public good. Admiration and endorsement of free markets is not – contrary to much uninformed commentary – admiration and endorsement of greed or materialism. It is, instead, the reflection of an acceptance of the reality … Read more
Those that accept this premise totally ignore that some of those “wretched underlings” rise to be able to manipulate the Government’s levers of Powers. Thus, this narrative von Mises has made sport of, is totally untrue and broken.
Good quote on Government (specifically New Zealand but similar to NH and other States) not seeing the value of Worship and treating it like secular activities (emphasis mine):
Time is running out on the shutdowns whether Government likes it or not: IRISH DEMOCRACY: Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. The lockdown can’t go on forever, and it isn’t. In Tennessee, we’re following a reasonably well-thought-out plan for reopening things. But a friend from Manhattan writes that she’s seeing stores, coffee shops, etc., … Read more
Yep, Grokster Ian gets a two-fer Day today; this one “Why Liberty?” and gives a perfect answer: Every other organizing principle for society begins by denying this fundamental truth about humans: You don’t know what’s best for me, and I don’t know what’s best for you. And so every other organizing principle is doomed to the kind of failure that … 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 … Read more
…which has been tasked on “restarting” the NH economy by “planning” how to “reopen” our economy. George Will: Markets produce many things secondarily, from shoes to trucks to novels, but primarily they produce information, in torrents that no government is intelligent enough to comprehend or nimble enough to respond to. Sure, Government can infringe, hinder, … 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 … Read more
Frank Knight could never have joined those of the self-selected elite who, in idea or practice, seek to plan, steer, or direct the lives of those who are excluded. He was a classical liberal, not because he predicted that only with widespread individual liberty would desired results be generated, but because the liberal order is … 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 … Read more
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who … Read more
Among the most common claims used to make the case for government provision of paid leave is that not every working woman gets paid leave, which supposedly demonstrates a market failure. Still, data show that 63% of women today have access to such leave, a 280% increase since the 1960s. The women who don’t receive … Read more
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. … Read more
…What I love about these rallies is that they provide such a stark contrast to the vision of America that the Democratic candidates keep describing. The story they’re selling is that these are dark times in a country that’s being run by a lawless autocrat. The rallies are filled with thousands of happy people who … Read more
SHOT: Matt Ridley ( The Rational Optimist) The future will feature ideas that are barely glints in engineers’ eyes right now – devices in space to harness the solar wind, say, or the rotational energy of the earth; or devices to shade the planet with mirrors placed at the Lagrange Point between the sun and the … Read more
Mr. Appelbaum says, “the marketplace is not a state of nature.” Yes it is. All humans trade, from about age eight on. The earliest evidence of trade comes from the Blombos Cave in South Africa, 70,000 years ago. The market, he says, “is an artifact of society.” Sure, but so is art and language and … Read more
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 … Read more