The Immoral Foundation of the Welfare State by Jacob G. Hornberger January 17, 2014 Permit me to propose a welfare program that will expose the foundation of immorality and wrongdoing that undergirds the welfare state way of life. Here’s my proposal: The federal government gives every single American adult an annual dole of $10,000. The money will be free, with no strings attached. No doubt both conservatives and liberals would enthusiastically embrace my proposal. ...
A Warped Measure of Success in the War on Poverty by Jacob G. Hornberger January 16, 2014 Proponents of the federal government’s war on poverty say that even though the war has not defeated poverty after 50 years of fierce warfare, it has been somewhat successful in alleviating poverty. What is the principal measure of success that welfare-statists point to? They point to the large number of people who have been put on the federal dole ...
A Totally Free Market System Is the Way to Defeat Poverty by Jacob G. Hornberger January 15, 2014 In response to my blog post of yesterday, “Failure, Failure Everywhere,” which discussed the manifest failure of the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and military empire and foreign interventionism, a progressive reader wrote me the following: Is freedom the right of corporate entrepreneurs to drive wages to frightfully low, existence-levels so that people who work ...
Failure, Failure Everywhere by Jacob G. Hornberger January 14, 2014 Those of us living today have been accorded the opportunity to witness the manifest failure of the America’s welfare-warfare state, as evidenced by three of the most important welfare-warfare programs of the federal government: the “war on poverty,” the “war on drugs,” and military empire and foreign interventionism. The war on poverty was declared by President Lyndon Johnson, a man ...
Master and Servant by Jacob G. Hornberger January 13, 2014 Imagine that you are a billionaire who, along with your spouse and children, lives in a mansion with 20 full-time servants. One day you discover the existence of a secret video camera in your bedroom. You hire an investigative team that scours your home for other cameras. It discovers that there is a secret camera in every room in ...
The Pipe Dream of NSA Reformers by Jacob G. Hornberger January 10, 2014 The pipe dream of many of those who are complaining about the NSA’s massive surveillance scheme is that the NSA can be “reined in” by some type of congressional legislation. They just don’t get it. As long as the NSA exists, it’s going to do whatever it needs to do to protect “national security,” even if that means breaking ...
Morality versus the National Security State by Jacob G. Hornberger January 9, 2014 One of the horrible consequences of the national-security state apparatus that was grafted onto America’s governmental system is how it has oftentimes placed Americans in the position of choosing between morality and obedience to the law. Just this week, we have been reminded of the conflict between morality and law back in 1971, during the height of the Cold War, ...
Freedom or “Security”? by Jacob G. Hornberger January 8, 2014 This week’s revelations about the 1971 burglary of an FBI office by seven antiwar activists shows the similarities between the U.S. government’s war on communism and the war on terrorism. In case you haven’t read about the burglary, here is the link to the New York Times article on what happened. The video that accompanies the article is really ...
Should the Military Have Ousted FDR? by Jacob G. Hornberger January 7, 2014 Among the reasons given for the Egyptian military’s ouster of the democratically elected president of the country, Mohamad Morsi, was that Morsi was exercising dictatorial powers and adopting policies that were destroying any chance of an economic recovery in Egypt. The Egyptian military, which the U.S. government continues to stand with and support, says that protecting “national security” trumped ...
Nothing but Failure for Welfare-Warfare Statists by Jacob G. Hornberger January 6, 2014 I can’t imagine why any statist would be proud of being a statist, especially given the manifest failure of his three favorite government programs — foreign interventionism, the war on poverty, and the war on drugs. Did you see that al-Qaeda has taken control over Fallujah in Iraq? Two things immediately come to mind. First, despite all the hoopla over ...
Why Not Force People to Attend Church? by Jacob G. Hornberger January 3, 2014 There is one big fundamental difference between libertarians and advocates of the welfare state: force. Libertarians say: Leave everyone free to keep his own money and decide what to do with it. Under libertarian principles, charity is entirely voluntary. If a person chooses to help out others, he must use his own money or money that has been voluntarily donated ...
The Progressives’ Achilles’ Heel by Jacob G. Hornberger January 2, 2014 Progressives (i.e., liberals in the corrupted meaning of the term) love to portray themselves as lovers of the poor. That’s what they use to justify their never-ending, ever-growing welfare-state and regulatory programs. But as we libertarians have repeatedly shown, the welfare state and the regulated economy actually constitute an enormous attack on the freedom and well-being of the poor. Minimum-wage laws, ...
