Is There a VAT in Our Future? by Laurence M. Vance August 1, 2021 President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan is expensive, really expensive. According to a White House “Fact Sheet,” this $1.8 trillion plan to “grow the middle class, expand the benefits of economic growth to all Americans, and leave the United States more competitive” includes “an additional four years of free, public education for our nation’s children” in the form of “free ...
Identity Politics and Systemic Racism Theory as the New Marxo-Nazism by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 2021 It is very easy to say that we have been and are living in unprecedented times in 2020 and 2021. We have experienced a global pandemic, with government-imposed and mandated lockdowns and shutdowns of much of America’s and the world’s economic activities and social interactions, as well as with governmental debts that cumulatively are almost equal to the global ...
There’s No Such Thing as “Market Fundamentalism,” Part 1 by George Leef August 1, 2021 Part 1 | Part 2 Zealots who want to force others to conform to their beliefs often exhibit a fundamentalist mindset. That is to say, they are utterly certain of the rectitude of their beliefs on the basis of some unchallengeable text, either sacred or secular. They assert what they believe to be true rather than engage in rational ...
Healthcare Whack-a-Mole by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2021 Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of libertarians and conservatives have played an extensive game of Whack-a-Mole. That’s the Japanese game in which plastic moles pop up at random on a board and a person whacks each mole as it appears. In Healthcare Whack-a-Mole, governmental assaults on liberty have continuously popped up during the course of the pandemic. As ...
Ambrose Bierce’s Pro-Freedom Cynicism by James Bovard July 1, 2021 The friends of freedom must recognize the verbal charades that sway people to surrender their rights and liberties. The political establishment and its media allies are continually abusing the English language to lull people into submission. From pupils being required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of each school day to adults being endlessly hectored to vote, ...
Should There Be Equal Pay for Equal Work? by Laurence M. Vance July 1, 2021 Although I rarely watch cable television, I happened to tune in to an episode of Mysteries at the Museum on the Travel Channel the other day. The segment I saw was about Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie” Murphy (1894–1964), the first female professional baseball player. The diminutive first baseman from Warren, Rhode Island, who was known professionally as Spike Murphy, billed ...
Modern Collectivist Trends and How to Resist Them by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2021 The First World War and the Great Depression were, I would suggest, the major events that have shaped most of the political, social, and economic trends for more than a century. The Great War, as it used to be called, undermined the generally “classical” liberal world that prevailed, at least in much of Western and Central Europe and North ...
Frank Chodorov’s Peaceful, Persistent Revolution, Part 2 by Wendy McElroy July 1, 2021 Part 1 | Part 2 Chodorov’s rejection of war was motivated largely by the growth of the state that accompanied it and that savaged individual freedom. Chapter 11 of his autobiography, entitled “Isolationism,” summarized his position: When the enemy is at the city gates, or the illusion that he is coming... the tendency is to turn over to the captain ...
James Woolsey’s JFK Conspiracy Theory, Part 2 by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2021 Part 1 | Part 2 After the deadly fiasco at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, where Cuban communist forces defeated a CIA-sponsored invasion of the island, things went from bad to worse with respect to the relationship between Kennedy and the U.S. national-security establishment. Convinced that the United States could not survive with a communist outpost only 90 miles away from ...
Biden’s Rescue Act Targets Americans’ Freedoms by James Bovard June 1, 2021 Since the 1800s, surly Americans have derided politicians for spending tax dollars “like drunken sailors.” Until recently, that was considered a grave character fault. But Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act shows that inebriated spending is now the path to national salvation. It was a common saying in America in the 1930s that “we cannot squander our way to prosperity.” ...
The Seven Deadly Sins of Government by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2021 What do King Solomon, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great), Dante Alighieri, and Mohandas Gandhi have to do with modern governments? Nothing, really, except that their emphasis on seven deadly evils provides us with the perfect pattern to categorize the deadly sins of government. “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him,” said King ...
Edwin Cannan: An Economist Who Protested against Big Government by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2021 One hundred years ago, the countries of Europe were trying to recover from the consequences of the First World War. It was not only the cost in human life (estimated to be more than 20 million people) and the military expenditures of nearly $5 trillion in today’s dollars. It was the political and ideological legacies of the war, as ...