The Great College-Hunger Hoax by James Bovard March 1, 2020 “Nearly half our college students are going hungry,” presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proclaimed in late November. Sanders’s tweet went viral, spurring more than 20,000 re-tweets and “likes.” Starving college students are a new rallying cry for social-justice warriors, spurring demands for new federal handouts and maybe even a college student-meal program modeled after school lunches. Some colleges are hyping hungry students ...
Are Americans Undertaxed? by Laurence M. Vance March 1, 2020 According to the Tax Foundation, Tax Freedom Day “is the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for the year.” Tax Freedom Day “takes all federal, state, and local taxes and divides them by the nation’s income”; that is, “every dollar that is officially part of net national income ...
Liberty versus Political Paternalism by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 2020 In 1951, German free-market economist Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966), delivered a series of lectures in Cairo, Egypt, titled “The Problems of Economic Order.” Looking over the terrain of modern politics and policy thinking in the world at that time, he told his audience, If I were asked to say what appeared to me as one of the gravest features of our ...
Capitalism, Freedom, and Progress by George Leef March 1, 2020 Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin Press, 2018); 496 pages. Almost everyone knows Alan Greenspan as the long-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve System. What far fewer know is that in his younger days, Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand and her anti-collectivist philosophy. ...
Monetary Destruction in America by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2020 The Constitution made it crystal clear what the official money of the United States was to be when it called the federal government into existence. That money was to be gold coins and silver coins, not paper money. Article 1, Section 10, of the Constitution, which is a restriction on the power of the states, states, “No State shall ... ...
The Deep State’s Demolition of Democracy by James Bovard February 1, 2020 “Thank God for the Deep State,” declared former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin while appearing on a panel at the National Press Club last October. In 2018, the New York Times asserted that Trump’s use of the term “Deep State” and similar rhetoric “fanned fears that he is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth ...
Are Uber Drivers Underpaid? by Laurence M. Vance February 1, 2020 After its initial public offering (IPO) in May 2019, Uber’s shares closed their first day of trading at $41.57 — 7.6 percent below the company’s offering price of $45. On November 6 — the day of the highly anticipated six-month “lockup” period following its IPO ended — early investors and employees looking to sell their stock for a big ...
Tigers Are Less Dangerous Than Tax Collectors and Political Paternalists by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 2020 We are told in The Analects of the famous ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC), Once Confucius was walking in the mountains and he came across a woman weeping by a grave. He asked the woman what her sorrow was, and she replied, “We are a family of hunters. My husband was bitten by a tiger and died. And now ...
Unleashing the Dogs of War by Matthew Harwood February 1, 2020 Presidents of War by Michael Beschloss (New York: Crown, 2018); 752 pages. Even with power in the hands of a political philosopher and statesman who understood the rabid nature of war, President James Madison couldn’t help but embroil the young nation in a conflict it wasn’t ready for. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, his ...
Socialism in America by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2020 Lost in the ongoing debate in America as to whether the United States should embrace socialism is a discomforting fact: America embraced socialism a long time ago. The problem is that many Americans have simply not wanted to accept that fact and instead have preferred living a life of denial. A complete socialist system would be one in which the ...
U.S. Foreign-Policy Perpetual Perfidy by James Bovard January 1, 2020 The Washington establishment was aghast in October when Donald Trump appeared to approve a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. The United States was seen as abandoning the Kurds, some of whom had assisted the United States in the fight against ISIS and other terrorist groups. But the indignation over the latest U.S. policy shift in the Middle East is ...
Ice and Fire by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2020 The relationship between conservatism and libertarianism is a tenuous one. However, such was not always the case. Fellow travelers of both groups were united in opposing Roosevelt’s New Deal. The work of the late economist Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) on the “Old Right” is indispensable here. After World War II, the political right was generally opposed, not only to ...