The Global Economy: Free Trade versus Managed Trade by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2024 In 1831, Sir Henry Parnell (1776–1842), a long-time chairman of the Financial Committee of the House of Commons, published On Financial Reform, in which he made the case for freedom of trade at a time when trade protectionism was mostly the order of the day in Great Britain, especially in agriculture: If once men were allowed to take their own ...
“Who Will Build the Roads?” Part 1 by Wendy McElroy June 1, 2024 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Everyone who argues for the free market over government involvement in the economy has heard this common comeback: “Who will build the roads?” Sometimes, the question is sincere and deserves to be answered with patience. Much of the time, however, it is the dismissal of a complex argument and is intended ...
How the Police State Muzzles Free Speech by John W. Whitehead May 31, 2024 “Politicians of both parties want to use the power of government to silence their foes. Some in the university community seek to drive it from their campuses. And an entire generation of Americans is being taught that free speech should be curtailed as soon as it makes someone else feel uncomfortable.”—William Ruger, “Free Speech Is Central ...
A Nanny State Idiocracy by John W. Whitehead May 24, 2024 “Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher We are caught in a vicious cycle of too many laws, too many cops, and too little freedom. It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by ...
What President Biden’s Tax Return Tells Us about Social Security by Laurence M. Vance May 22, 2024 President Biden has released his latest federal tax return, the one for tax year 2023. He has released the most tax returns of any president in U.S. history. What we are concerned about here, however, is not how much money the president and first lady made or how much they gave to charity but rather how ...
The Steady Slide Towards Tyranny by John W. Whitehead May 8, 2024 “As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”—Former presidential advisor Bertram Gross The American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer towards a pervasive authoritarianism. The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being ...
Border Tyranny by Jacob G. Hornberger May 5, 2024 Libertarian advocates of immigration controls always focus solely on the issue of immigration controls and never on the police state that comes with them. That’s because the police-state aspects of an immigration-control system make them extremely uncomfortable given the fact that a police state is the opposite of a libertarian society. I believe that it’s important to constantly remind people ...
Time to Separate Piety and Politics by James Bovard May 5, 2024 The First Amendment of the Constitution specifies, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In Washington, the “free exercise thereof” perennially includes politicians exploiting religion to sanctify themselves and all their power grabs. Piety with a side of eggs One of the most brazen if not most shameless “free exercise thereof” examples ...
Why Libertarians Loathe Tariffs by Laurence M. Vance May 5, 2024 Former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump loves tariffs. In his 2011 book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, Trump included as part of his five-part tax policy “a 20 percent tax for importing goods.” During his first campaign for president, he called for a 35 percent tariff on cars and trucks imported from a ...
Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian Theory of Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle, Part 3 by Richard M. Ebeling May 5, 2024 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 When the English-language edition of Ludwig von Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit was published 90 years ago, in 1934, the world was in the midst of the Great Depression. The American stock market crash in October 1929 soon snowballed into a severe economic downtown in 1930 and 1931 ...
Social Justice Fallacies by George Leef May 5, 2024 Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books, 2023) Now 93, Thomas Sowell continues to produce excellent work — work that would help the United States escape from the grip of statism if people would heed him. Sowell has just published a new book, Social Justice Fallacies, and it contains a wealth of common sense about that ...
The Flat Tax Revisited Yet Again by Laurence M. Vance May 3, 2024 Tax season ended last month, but talk of tax reform is still very much with us. Many provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that the Republican-controlled Congress passed, and President Trump signed into law, in 2017 will expire at the end of 2025, along with other temporary tax provisions not enacted by the TCJA—commonly known as “tax ...