Surely any champion of freedom wants to get rid of the income tax. And surely the way to really get rid of the income tax is to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Right?
Wrong.
Repealing the Sixteenth Amendment would be a waste of time because its disappearance would change nothing. Alas, Congress could continue to tax incomes (and anything else).
The rest of this week's TGIF, "Don't Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment!," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself.
I get nervous when presidential candidates -- or their surrogates -- take up subjects that are clearly none of their business. Actually, most of what they talk about is none of their business. But some things are so far over the line that hearing politicians discuss them gives me the creeps. Herbert Spencer, where are you when we need you?The rest of this week's TGIF, "Statecraft Is Not Soulcraft," is at Foundation for Economic Education website.
The rest of this week's op-ed, "100 Years in Iraq?" is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
John McCain, the Republican candidate for president who dubiously claims the status of war hero because he was imprisoned and beaten after bombing civilian targets in North Vietnam 40 years ago, apparently wants other young men to have the chance to become war heroes.
It is very easy for you, O respectable citizen, seated in your easy chair, with your feet on the fender, to hold forth on the misconduct of the people – very easy for you to censure their extravagant and vicious habits …. It is no honor to you that you do not spend your savings in sensual gratification; you have pleasures enough without. But what would you do if placed in the position of the laborer? How would these virtues of yours stand the wear and tear of poverty? Where would your prudence and self-denial be if you were deprived of all the hopes that now stimulate you …? Let us see you tied to an irksome employment from dawn till dusk; fed on meager food, and scarcely enough of that …. Suppose your savings had to be made, not, as now, out of surplus income, but out of wages already insufficient for necessaries; and then consider whether to be provident would be as easy as you at present find it. Conceive yourself one of a despised class contemptuously termedPretty pathetic Social Darwinist, if you ask me.the great unwashed; stigmatized as brutish, stolid, vicious … and then say whether the desire to be respectable would be as practically operative on you as now. … How offensive it is to hear some pert, self-approving personage, who thanks God that he is not as other men are, passing harsh sentence on his poor, hard-worked, heavily burdened fellow countrymen …. (Social Statics, pp. 203–5)
In the case of mortgage markets, the internal contradictions of regulatory policy are more of a problem than the execution of the policy. For example, you can't place a high priority on home ownership for the "under-served" and then act all put out when so many of these folks who can't afford homes wind up in foreclosure.
You show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the market and load his production costs onto the backs of the public. Tax-payers give away $65 billion every year in subsidies to big oil, and more than $35 billion a year in subsidies to western welfare cowboys. Those subsidies helped create the billionaires who financed the right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and put Bush in the White House. While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business. True free-markets, in which businesses pay all the costs of bringing their products to market, is the most efficient and democratic way of distributing the goods of the land – and the surest way to eliminate pollution. Free markets, when allowed to function, value raw materials and encourage producers to eliminate waste by reduc-ing, reusing, and recycling. I don't think of myself as an environmentalist anymore; I consider myself a free-marketeer.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to know something that too many libertarians don't know.
Thud. That was the sound of the other shoe dropping. In response to severe problems in the credit markets, thanks to years of government intervention, the Federal Reserve, the government's counterfeiter and chief culprit in the current crisis, has opened its discount window to the investment banks. Interest rate: 2.5 percent. Until recently, only commercial banks could borrow money from the Fed. But now investment banks may also -- and here's the kicker: They can put up shaky mortgage-backed securities as collateral. Which means the American people are potentially on the hook for those loans. Should they go bad, we Americans will pay either in inflation-induced higher prices or higher taxes. Investment banks that may have invested in bad mortgages are already taking advantage of the new opportunity. Is this a great country or what?The rest of this week's TGIF, "Bailout Hypocrisy," is at the Foundation for Economic Foundation website.
A few years ago, FrontPageMag.com columnist Paul Marek wrote an article titled “Why the Peaceful Majority Is Irrelevant”. His thesis was that even if the majority of Muslims abhor violence, it doesn’t matter because “the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.... The hard quantifiable fact is, that the ‘peaceful majority’ is the ‘silent majority’ and it is cowed and extraneous.”For Marek, the upshot is this: “We must pay attention to the only group that counts: the fanatics who threaten our way of life.”
He’s wrong. No, he’s worse than wrong, because his position could be used to justify mass murder.
The rest of my op-ed, "Why the Peaceful Majority of Muslims Are Not Irrelevant," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
Pushed to the brink of collapse by the mortgage crisis, Bear Stearns Cos. agreed -- after prodding by the federal government -- to be sold to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. for the fire-sale price of $2 a share in stock, or about $236 million. Bear Stearns had a stock-market value of about $3.5 billion as of Friday -- and was worth $20 billion in January 2007. But the crisis of confidence that swept the firm and fueled a customer exodus in recent days left Bear Stearns with a horrible choice: sell the firm -- at any price -- to a big bank willing to assume its trading obligations or file for bankruptcy....To help facilitate the deal, the Federal Reserve is taking the extraordinary step of providing as much as $30 billion in financing for Bear Stearns's less-liquid assets, such as mortgage securities that the firm has been unable to sell, in what is believed to be the largest Fed advance on record to a single company.At Liberty & Power, Sudha Shenoy comments:
Fed officials wouldn't describe the exact financing terms or assets involved. But if those assets decline in value, the Fed would bear any loss, not J.P. Morgan.
The sale of Bear Stearns and Sunday night's move by the Fed to offer loans to other securities dealers mark the latest historic turns in what has become the most pervasive financial crisis in a generation. [Emphasis added.]
In the absence of Federal Reserve intervention & arm-twisting, Bear Stearns would undoubtedly have had to cease trading. And no doubt it would’ve been taken over, eventually -- at an even lower price. All that govt officials could do was to shorten this time period, & possibly prevent Bear Stearns’ value from falling even further. But even the almighty Federal Reserve -- the world’s largest & most powerful central bank -- could not prevent the huge capital losses that Bear Stearns’ shareholders suffered. In short, even the Fed could not stop the de facto failure of one of the world’s largest investment companies.Bear's shares were going for $30 on Friday. They were at $170 a year ago. J.P. Morgan Chase picked them up, with government help, for $2. The government tried to rescue these high rollers, but apparently there are limits to what this virtually unlimited government can do.
What does all this signify? Even the US govt -- the world’s largest & most frightening -- is not & cannot be, omnipotent. True, the Fed’s officials did their best to paper over the cracks -- but that was all they could do.
I've been reading the news about soon-to-be-ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer with mixed feelings. Yes, mixed. On the one hand, there is something satisfying in seeing an insufferably self-righteous, politically ambitious, ham-handed, and ethically challenged former prosecutor lose his grip on power because he did what he used to prosecute other people for doing. On the other hand, he was caught in a victimless crime because the ludicrously named Patriot Act requires banks to inform the IRS when their depositors engage in "suspicious," that is, unusual, financial activity. Big Brother lives.The rest of this week's TGF, "Big Brother Really Is Watching," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
When a private company screws up, there is no shortage of people demanding more government intrusion in the marketplace. But when the government screws up, they don’t call for less government. They call for more.My latest op-ed, "The Government's Chickens Are Back," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.The economy is slowing down, and the government is at fault. But, if anything, the policymakers and pundits want the government to do more of what got us into trouble in the first place. If a lot of poison is bad, a lot more is somehow good. That’s the logic of statism.
The big political buzz is over whether John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama are qualified to be president. The voters are expected to decide, but are they qualified to do that? Don't bet on it.The rest of my TGIF, "Are the Voters Qualified to Pick a President?" is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
The economist Joan Robinson (1903-1983) wrote, "The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of readymade answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."
A better reason to study economics is to avoid being deceived by politicians; they are the far greater threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When you consider that the typical political campaign is little more than a series of confidence games, understanding basic economics is a matter of survival. Without such an understanding one is an easy mark.
The rest of this week's TGIF, "Health-Care Cons," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
I don’t usually come to the defense of conservatives, but I am perplexed that they are being attacked because they don’t support John McCain’s presidential bid. Self-anointed Voices of Responsibility are chiding conservative spokesmen and spokeswomen for criticizing McCain on several counts and for going as far as promising to vote for Hillary Clinton if she’s the alternative to the Arizona senator.
Would these conservatives really promote a Democratic victory in November in order to initiate a reform of the Republican Party, the allegedly more mature McCain supporters want to know.
Well, why not? Shouldn’t principle count for something?
The rest of my latest op-ed, "GOP, R.I.P?" is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
The hoopla over Super Tuesday reminded me of an essay I read long ago by Bruno Leoni (1913-1967), an Italian legal scholar and great champion of liberty. I've been meaning to discuss the many important themes in his book, Freedom and the Law (expanded third edition), and will surely return to it in the near future. But for now I'll focus on the final chapter, "Voting Versus the Market."The rest of this week's TGIF, "The Crazy Arithmetic of Voting," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
Not understanding basic economics is dangerous because you’re vulnerable to political con games foisted by unscrupulous politicians.Economics properly conceived is just common sense about human activity. An examination of the proposed economic stimulus will make this clear.
The rest of my op-ed, "Political Stimulus," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
"It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing -- the water in the shallow end doesn't get any deeper."That's how George Mason University economist Russell Roberts describes the logic -- rather, illogic -- of the economic "stimulus" proposals that everyone and his uncle are proposing.
The rest of last week's TGIF, "An Unstimulating Idea," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
Republican presidential contender Ron Paul certainly deserves credit for putting the foreign policy of noninterventionism into the public debate. It’s about time. For decades U.S. presidents have sought to manage the world in behalf of what they call “American interests,” and all it has brought is death, mayhem, anti-Americanism, and a price tag that would blow the average citizen’s mind if he fully grasped it.Yes, the time for this debate is long overdue. Unfortunately, the quality of the debate on the other side is pathetic.
The rest of my latest op-ed, "Pathetic Arguments for Foreign Intervention," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.
The writer Michael Kinsley is very intelligent. He is also very glib, and his glibness often gets in the way of his intelligence. The expression "too clever by half" seems to have been coined for him. This is most obvious when he writes about the libertarian philosophy, as he did recently for the Washington Post website.The rest of the latest TGIF, "Those Too-Consistent Libertarians," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
Consistent advocates of individual liberty often point out that government restrictions on free immigration violate the rights of people not born in the United States. Not only are they denied their freedom to move and improve their lot in life, but if they make it into the United States, they are subjected to police-state raids and exploitation because their illegal status denies them access to justice.The rest of my latest op-ed, "More Victims of Immigration Control," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.While the immigrants themselves bear the brunt of U.S. immigration policy and will suffer even more regardless of who becomes president next year, they are not the only victims. Additional victims are to be found among American citizens.
[I]t's all classic Ron Paul: Get rid of the income tax and replace it with nothing; find the money to support those dependent on Social Security and Medicare by shutting down the worldwide empire, while giving the young a path out of the programs; don't pass a draft; have a foreign policy of friendship and trade, not wars and subsidies. He attacks the drug war, condemning the idea of arresting people who have never harmed anyone else's person or property. He stresses [note well] the disproportionate and unfair treatment minorities get from drug law enforcement. One of his biggest applause lines, to my astonishment, involves getting rid of the Federal Reserve....
He wraps up the speech with three things he doesn't want to do that sum up the Ron Paul message First, "I don't want to run your life. We all have different values. I wouldn't know how to do it, I don't have the authority under the Constitution, and I don't have the moral right." Second: "I don't want to run the economy. People run the economy in a free society." And third: " I don't want to run the world.... We don't need to be imposing ourselves around the world."
"The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was not an attack on this brave woman alone; it was an attack upon democracy, freedom and the United States." This statement by Asa Hutchinson, former undersecretary of homeland security, was typical of the reaction of the American political and media establishments.The rest of my op-ed "Hands Off Pakistan" is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.The claim that the assassination was an attack on democracy and freedom is dubious because Bhutto’s two spells as prime minister of Pakistan were not notable for either one. Whether it was an attack on the United States depends on what that means. It certainly was not an attack on the American people. How could it be construed that way, unless one has such an imperialist notion of "our interests" that nothing can happen in the world without impinging on them?
But if by “United States” we mean the policies of the current administration, then indeed it was such an attack. Bhutto, after all, favored bringing U.S. military forces into Pakistan, according to Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst and region specialist. If that’s an option President Bush planned to exercise, the loss of Bhutto is a grave blow to his policy.
Paul Krugman, the New York Times op-ed writer, has a Ph.D. in economics. Those three magic letters give him an air of authority, as if they represent a valuable accomplishment, yet somehow he manages to consistently give bad economic advice in his twice-weekly column. Go figure.The rest of this week's TGIF, "Paul Krugman, Doctor of (Bad) Economics," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."He might have emphasized that Lincoln did not forcibly prevent southern secession to end slavery but rather to preserve the Union and said that he would have maintained slavery had that been necessary to keep the Union intact.REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..
MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.
REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.
The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.--Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2007
Is waterboarding, known during the Spanish Inquisition as tortura del agua, really torture or not? The question seems to answer itself, but the Bush administration says No. Its critics disagree, noting that the “interrogation technique,” which makes a subject physically and mentally react as though he is drowning, has long been regarded as torture by international agreements and outlawed in the United States.The rest of this week's op-ed, "Torturing the Language of Torture," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
'Tis the political season, which means the season to bash immigrants. This goes especially for so-called illegal aliens, i.e., residents without government papers. (As if that's a big deal.) Candidates and others who are so set on securing the Mexican border -- the Canadian border seems of less concern -- and expelling those who had the audacity to come to the land of the free without permission mainly rely on two arguments: jobs and welfare. If those are the best arguments they've got, they haven't got much.The rest of this week's TGIF, "A Matter of Priorities," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
If the foundation of our case for liberty is nothing more than the Constitution -- rather than natural-law justice -- we will continue to be trumped by our opponents. After all, the Constitution was in effect all during the time the national government expanded and liberty shrank. As Lysander Spooner wrote, the Constitution "has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it." Liberty's champions have to come to terms with that logic.The rest of the newest TGIF, "The Constitution or Liberty," is at the Foundation for Economic Foundation website.
Hat tip: Jacob HornbergerRICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- If you're planning to vote in Virginia's February Republican presidential primary, be prepared to sign an oath swearing your Republican loyalty.
The State Board of Elections on Monday approved a state Republican Party request to require all who apply for a GOP primary ballot first vow in writing that they'll vote for the party's presidential nominee next fall.
There's no practical way to enforce the oath. Virginia doesn't require voters to register by party, and for years the state's Republicans have fretted that Democrats might meddle in their open primaries.
Virginia Democrats aren't seeking such an oath for their presidential primary, which is held the same day -- February 12th.
He doesn't even understand the difference between non-intervention and isolationism. I'm not an isolationism, (shakes head) em, isolationist. I want to trade with people, talk with people, travel. But I don't want to send troops overseas using force to tell them how to live. We would object to it here and they're going to object to us over there.
One gets the feeling that even the White House realizes the mess it’s made of Iraq. The other day the newspapers reported that the Bush administration has scaled back its objectives rather substantially. We might call it Iraq 3.0. First the plan was to create a democratic paradise which, domino-like, would spread freedom throughout the Middle East. When that didn’t work, the administration shifted to simply bringing some kind of order to Iraq, reconciling the three largest groups — Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurd. That hasn’t gone too well either. The nearly two dozen political objectives that the military “surge” was intended to accomplish have largely gone unachieved. The violence level may have fallen (one never knows how temporary such things are), but there are many possible explanations for that. One horrifying explanation is that enough ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and emigration have occurred that less violence is “necessary” in the eyes of the various militias. That presumably is not the sort of peace President Bush had in mind. So now the strategists in Washington have retooled.The rest of my op-ed, "Iraq 3.0," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
Democratic presidential candidates are tripping over the driver’s-licenses-for-illegal-aliens issue like a bunch of old slapstick vaudevillians. What’s so comical about their antics is that the issue demonstrates that politicians are locked into bad assumptions from top to bottom. Start with driver’s licenses. In one debate Sen. Chris Dodd said driving “is a privilege not a right.” That’s a common belief. But it’s incoherent.The rest of this week's op-ed, "Should the State License People?," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
The rest of this week's TGIF, "Individualism, Collectivism, and Other Murky Labels," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.Imagine the following person. He believes all individuals should be free to do "anything that's peaceful" and therefore favors private property, free global markets, freedom of contract, civil liberties, and all the related ideas that come under the label "libertarianism" (or liberalism). Obviously he is not a statist. But is he an individualist and a capitalist or a socialist and a collectivist? It sounds like an easy question, but on closer inspection it's not.
"Vouchers go down in crushing defeat"The rest of my latest TGIF, "Ersatz School Choice," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
That headline thundered from Wednesday's Salt Lake City Tribune, as it announced that more than 60 percent of Utahans who voted on whether to uphold the statewide school-voucher program said no. It was a big setback for the voucher movement. The Utah legislature had approved the program by one vote. But the teachers' union, which opposes vouchers, gathered enough signatures to put the question to the voters. It poured a ton of money into its successful effort to have the people veto the law. This was the tenth time in over 30 years that voters have defeated school vouchers or education tax credits, says the National School Boards Association.
It may not look like a win for the cause of educational freedom, but in the long run it might be. That depends on what we do about it.
John McCain scored a standing ovation at the last Republican presidential debate when he attacked Sen. Hillary Clinton for proposing — unsuccessfully — to spend a million taxpayer dollars on a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock festival, saying, “Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time. But the fact is, my friends, no one can be president of the United States that supports projects such as these.” It would be easy to criticize McCain for politically exploiting his five-and-half years of suffering as a captive of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. But there’s a more important point to be made.The rest of my op-ed, "Woodstock May Have Saved Sen. McCain’s Life," is at the website of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Remember, Remember the Fifth of November Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter and policy adviser to President George W. Bush, is the latest in a long line of political writers who fail to see the distinction between a virtue and an enforceable legal obligation. Missing that difference leads to all sorts of mischief and undermines a writer's insistence that he favors liberty. Some people may find it an unpleasant choice, but choose they must: freedom or compulsion? There is no third way.The rest of my TGIF column, "Virtue versus Legal Obligation," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
President Bush has been a busy man. Even though the quagmire in Iraq threatens to worsen as Turkey prepares to invade the Kurdish north, Bush has time to undertake the arduous task of preventing World War III and begin the transition to democracy in Cuba. How does he do it?!My latest op-ed, "Bush Has Time to Run the World," distributed by The Future of Freedom Foundation, appears today on Counterpunch. Read the rest here.
Last week I discussed Anthony de Jasay's claim that the freedom philosophy -- liberalism -- is precarious because it "has always been rather loose, tolerant of heterogeneous components, easy to influence, open to infiltration by alien ideas that are in fact inconsistent with any coherent version of it." He specifically criticized the utilitarianism of Bentham and the Mills. In light of the deficiency he has identified, Mr. de Jasay attempts no less than a reconstruction of liberalism.The rest of this week's TGIF, "Liberty and Political Obedience," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
Blackwater’s involvement in Iraq has been ugly but misunderstood. The presence of security contractors in Iraq does not signify that the war has been privatized. Unfortunately, the word “privatization” has been corrupted over the years.The rest of my op-ed, "Blackwater and Bush's War" is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
The shifting meaning of the word liberal in the direction of statism has been analyzed often. But a few years ago Anthony de Jasay wrote a short comment on the matter that deserves attention. For Mr. de Jasay, the problem is not merely terminological. As he wrote in "Liberalism, Loose or Strict" (Independent Review, Winter 2005), while political ideas such as nationalism and socialism have had core principles, "Liberalism, I maintain, has never had such an irreducible and unalterable core element. As a doctrine, it has always been rather loose, tolerant of heterogeneous components, easy to influence, open to infiltration by alien ideas that are in fact inconsistent with any coherent version of it. One is tempted to say that liberalism cannot protect itself because its 'immune system' is too weak." His statement does seem to explain why liberalism has taken many forms over the centuries.The rest of this week's TGIF, "What Nearly Killed Liberalism," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
The right wing went apoplectic at the skepticism that greeted Gen. David Petraeus’s recent testimony about the alleged success of the military escalation in Iraq. It was as though a member of the military was incapable of engaging in spin to support his commander in chief’s war policy. President Bush summed up this attitude revealingly when he said it was one thing to attack him, but quite another to question General Petraeus. War, Clausewitz noted, is politics by other means. That makes high-ranking generals a species of politician. Not a few have harbored presidential thoughts, and some have made it. It is said that Petraeus would like to be another. These are the people the pro-war conservatives are willing to trust implicitly? (Anti-war members of the armed forces, on the other hand, are, in Rush Limbaugh’s words, “phony soldiers.”)It is unappreciated today that an earlier American culture was anti-militarist. In his classic study The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition (1956), historian Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. wrote, “The tradition of antimilitarism has been an important factor in the shaping of some two hundred years of American history.”
The rest of my op-ed, "America's Anti-Militarist Tradition," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand's stunning novel, Atlas Shrugged. So many words have been written about the book that the task of saying something new is daunting. It is a celebration of the creativity that is required for the production of material goods no less than for the production of music, art, and literature. And it is an elaboration of the preconditions for that creativity: individual freedom, which necessarily includes property rights. In sum, Atlas Shrugged is a literary brief for the proposition that human beings can live fully as human beings only in a society founded on the freedom philosophy, i.e., on self-ownership, private property, privacy, consent, free trade, and peace -- in a phrase, laissez faire. What sometimes goes unappreciated by readers of the novel is the extent to which Rand targeted business people as potentially the most egregious saboteurs of freedom.The rest of this week's TGIF, "Atlas Shrugged and the Corporate State," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is no one to admire, but when was the last time President Bush stood before a critical college audience and fielded tough questions? Bush appears only before handpicked friendly crowds. Even news conferences are barely adversarial because the media has the curious rule that the president -- any president -- deserves to be treated like royalty.The rest of my op-ed, "Ahmadinejad," is at The Future of Freedom Foundation website.
A popular academic rationalization for having government forcibly override people's economic decisions is the theory of market failure. Advocates of the free market have long emphasized that the countless self-regarding actions individuals perform daily in the marketplace generate a larger complex spontaneous, or undesigned, order -- that is, a high degree of interpersonal coordination that is remarkably pleasing to consumers. This is the social cooperation Ludwig von Mises placed at the center of his description of the market process. Critics of the market realize this is a powerfully appealing feature of the economists' case for what these critics deride as the unfettered marketplace. So this feature has been among the prime targets of those who would straitjacket or even abolish the market. Hence the attraction of market-failure theory.The rest of my TGIF column, "Government Failure," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
