How About Permanently Closing Public Schools? by Jacob G. Hornberger May 22, 2020 Amidst the death and suffering arising from the coronavirus crisis, people have an opportunity to ponder some important questions about life and liberty. One question arises in the context of when state and local officials should force children back into school: Why should the state be involved in education at all? Since all of us ...
Free Trade Raises Standards of Living by Jacob G. Hornberger May 20, 2020 I find it amazing that there are still people in life who favor trade restrictions and trade wars. If there is anything credible economists agree on, almost 145 years after the publication of Adam Smith’s treatise The Wealth of Nations, it is that free trade is a good thing. In every trade, both sides benefit. ...
Government Debt in Argentina and the U.S. by Jacob G. Hornberger May 19, 2020 Those who continue to celebrate the out-of-control spending, debt, and inflation spree on which U.S. officials have embarked should continue focusing on Argentina, a country whose government is now in the throes of an economic and financial crisis owing to an unsustainable debt burden. Take a look at the website usdebtclock.org to get a sense ...
The FDR Plan to Restore America by Jacob G. Hornberger May 18, 2020 Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation and a former participant in the AmericaCorps VISTA program, has a plan to restore America. It’s set forth in an article today published by the New York Times. Drawing on President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression, he wants the federal government to ...
Early Americans Would Have Rejected the U.S. Government by Jacob G. Hornberger May 15, 2020 Even though most Americans are obviously unhappy with the federal government, many of them don’t question the structure of the government itself. Their ire is directed toward officials, not the governmental structure that such officials manage. They are satisfied with how the federal government is structured and just want “better people” managing it. The irony is ...
My Discovery of Freedom by Jacob G. Hornberger May 14, 2020 What surprised me most about discovering libertarianism is the fact that I wasn’t living in a free society, as I had been taught all my life. I was 28 years old when I discovered libertarianism. Up to that point, I “knew” I lived in a free country. That’s what I had been told and taught ever ...
Three Reminders from The Bill of Rights by Jacob G. Hornberger May 13, 2020 As a condition for accepting the Constitution, the American people demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights immediately after ratification of the Constitution. They had been assured that the Constitution was calling into existence a national government whose powers were limited to those enumerated in the Constitution. But that did not satisfy them. They wanted a ...
Businesses, Employees, and the Coronavirus Crisis by Jacob G. Hornberger May 11, 2020 Throughout the long sordid history of socialism, socialists have decried the supposed conflict of interest between employers and employees. Employers exist just to exploit the workers, socialists claim. If it weren’t for government minimum-wage laws, employers would pay their employees no more than bare subsistence wages. Socialists have also long claimed that through their acquisition of profits, ...
Argentina’s Default Points Toward the U.S. Future by Jacob G. Hornberger May 8, 2020 As the Washington, D.C., establishment and its acolytes in the U.S. mainstream press continue to celebrate the $4 trillion in new federal spending for the coronavirus crisis, Argentina has a sobering message for the American people. According to CNBC, the Argentine government is on the brink of defaulting on payment of its debt. Last ...
The Most Unusual Society in History by Jacob G. Hornberger May 7, 2020 No matter what people might say about 19th-century America, one incontrovertible fact stands out: It was the most unusual society in history. We know that there were bad founding principles of the country. No doubt about that. Slavery was the worst. There were others, like violation of women’s rights, land grants to the railroads, tariffs, ...
The Great Fictitious Entity by Jacob G. Hornberger May 6, 2020 In his great little book The Law, the 19th-century French libertarian legislator Frederic Bastiat wrote one of the most profound insights on welfare-state socialism ever penned: “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.” Bastiat was one of the first libertarian writers I came ...
A Libertarian Head of the IRS? by Jacob G. Hornberger May 5, 2020 Years ago, a segment of the libertarian movement resigned itself to simply trying to reform America’s welfare-warfare state way of life. Like conservatives did after the 1964 presidential election, when Democrat Lyndon Johnson smashed his GOP opponent Barry Goldwater, such libertarians threw in the towel on achieving freedom and just accepted the inevitability and the permanence of ...
