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A Libertarian Head of the IRS?

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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 America’s welfare-warfare state way of life. Like conservatives, they have devoted their lives to reforming the welfare-warfare state with “public-policy prescriptions” and reform-oriented programs based on “choice.” Over the years, such “public-policy prescriptions” and “choice” programs have included things like school vouchers, health-savings accounts, Social Security “privatization,” income-tax and IRS reform, selective foreign interventionism, surveillance reform, FISA Court reform, Patriot Act reform, drug-war reform, Pentagon reform, and CIA reform. Have any of these reforms improved the plight of the American people living under welfare-warfare-state serfdom? Maybe, but not necessarily. School vouchers, for example, ended up more deeply ...

Fifty Years of Statist Policies and Economic Fallacies

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It is about fifty years since, as an undergraduate, I took my first economics classes in college. Virtually all my professors were adamant that unrestrained market capitalism was unworkable, and on the way out. Planning, many of them said, was the future for complex societies and economic development. Like “deva vu, all over again,” the same claims are being insisted upon a half-century later, with nothing seeming to have been learned from all that has happened since. Back then, my Marxist and Keynesian professors said that market economies may have been sufficient in simpler, “horse-and-buggy” days of the past with rudimentary farming and small craftsmen and proprietary businesses. That was a long-gone era, when people could be “rugged individualists”; but today’s society is too intricate with degrees of interdependence and mass production that cannot be trusted to selfish, laissez-faire, profit-oriented private enterprises and corporations. There needed to be the “big picture,” and only government had that Olympian perspective representing the society ...

The Money-Printing Gods Have Failed

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Hooray! Finally even the robo-machines and day traders are puking, not BTFDing. Today’s 3,000 Dow Point Dump says even they have had enough of the craven dolts who occupy the Eccles Building. You do not need an PhD in economics—or even a night school survey course—to see that COVID-19 is temporary supply side shock which 0.05% money market rates are powerless to combat. Likewise, you don’t need to be a finance wizard to see that with 10-year USTs at 0.78% and 30-year mortgages at their lowest level in history more QE is a sick joke. Adding another $700 billion of government and GSE debt to the Fed’s already hideously bloated balance sheet can’t possibly drive interest rates meaningfully lower, even if rates were a barrier to activity, which they are not. In fact, the new barrage of QE5 is nothing more than a blatant financial fraud authorized by the official criminals domiciled in the Eccles Building. Today, and for years in the past, ...

Not Losing Sight of the Classical Liberal Ideal

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In the midst of the Second World War, the famous Austrian-born economist Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950), published his famous book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). He asked the question, “Can Capitalism Survive?” He answered, “No.” He expected some form of socialism, dictatorial or “democratic,” to supersede the private market economy in postwar America. He was proven wrong. Postwar American ...

Adhering to Principle to Achieve Liberty, Part 2

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Part 1 | Part 2 In 1990, the first year of The Future of Freedom Foundation’s existence, I wrote an article entitled “Letting Go of Socialism” (www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/letting-socialism) in which I criticized the idea of school vouchers. I pointed out that vouchers were simply another socialist program in which government forcibly takes money from one group of people and gives ...