Cutting Taxes Is Selfish by Sheldon Richman August 1, 1997 Washington is a land of grand farce. People here routinely say things that no one believes, not even the person saying it. They do things they know are absurd. They can't help it. To stop is to confess what cannot be confessed: that the political enterprise is just a big con game. A classic example of what I mean took ...
Laundering: The Criminalization of Everything by James Bovard August 1, 1997 Money-laundering statutes epitomize how the government has shirked going after violent criminals and instead is routinely impaling innocent citizens and penny-ante misfits in order to maximize its number of convictions. If the government cannot catch the guilty, at least it can scourge the innocent. In the same way that ...
Freedom in Transactions by Fredric Bastiat August 1, 1997 On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — Here are a million of human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast ...
Power Corrupts by Ben Moreel August 1, 1997 When a person gains power over other persons the political power to force other persons to do his bidding when they do not believe it right to do so it seems inevitable that a moral weakness develops in the person who exercises that power. It may take time ...
Book Review: The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 1997 The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America by Paul Craig Roberts and Karen Lafollette Araujo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); 214 pages; $25. The mass media has focused public attention on the dramatic attempts to implement market-oriented reforms in Eastern Europe, Russia, and other countries in the former Soviet Union. Less attention has been given to another part of the ...
Heaven’s Gate and the Cult of the Socialistic Welfare State, Part 1 by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 1997 Part 1 | Part 2 Several months ago, police discovered the bodies of members of a cult known as Heaven's Gate. The cult members had taken their own lives, apparently under the belief that they would be transported to a space ship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet that would take them on an intergalactic space trip. The Heaven's Gate episode ...
Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 7: Friedrich A. Hayek and the Destabilizing Influence of a Stable Price Level by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 1997 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | ...
Stop the Flood of Taxpayer Money by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1997 Again this year, spring was heralded by swollen rivers in the Midwest. The overflowing Ohio River and Red River have caused heartbreak and millions of dollars of damage in several states in the region. And once again a colossal public policy blunder was committed: the handing out of millions of taxpayer dollars in relief assistance. It would be too much ...
Public Schools: Turning Children and Parents into Peons by James Bovard July 1, 1997 Public education is the most expensive "gift" that most Americans will ever receive. Government school systems are increasingly coercive and abusive toward both parents and students. While politicians speak grandly of the supposed benefits of public education, government courts have ensured that parents and children have no legal rights ...
Repealing, Not Reforming, Social Security, Part 2 by Doug Bandow July 1, 1997 Part 1 | Part 2 What, then, do we do about Social Security? There are three general alternatives. The first is to tinker, while keeping Social Security essentially as it is. The second is to privatize the system by paying off current retirees and mandating private retirement contributions. The third is to simply repeal Social Security. First, tinkering with the ...
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx July 1, 1997 We were warned of the general procedure and the specific measures for a successful communist or socialist revolution by Karl Marx, the "father" of communism, in 1848: "We have seen . . . that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, ...
Book Review: Dynamics of the Mixed Economy by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 1997 Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism by Sanford Ikeda (New York: Routledge, 1997); 296 pages; $69.95. POPULAR RHETORIC in the news media and in political discussions claims that with the fall of communism, free-market economics has triumphed around the world. In fact, this is not the case. While Soviet-style socialist central planning is dead, laissez-faire capitalism is ...