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“It Can’t Happen Here”

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Also see: “The Critical Dilemma Facing Pro-War Libertarians” “The Pentagon's Power to Arrest, Torture, and Execute Americans” “The Islamo-Fascist Rationale for Abandoning Liberty” In my article “The Pentagon’s Power to Arrest, Torture, and Execute Americans,” I explained that the post–9/11 power to designate Americans as “enemy combatants” in the “war on terror” has revolutionized America’s legal system by enabling the Pentagon to circumvent the rights and guarantees in the Bill of Rights. In my article “The Critical Dilemma Facing Pro-War Libertarians,” I explained that 9/11 has confronted pro-war libertarians with what undoubtedly is one of the biggest moral and philosophical quandaries of their lives — whether to remain committed to a conservative foreign policy, thereby giving up their commitment to a free society, or to embrace libertarian principles ...

Funding Leviathan, Part 1

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Part 1 | Part 2 The federal leviathan is fed by taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, during the federal government’s most recent fiscal year (FY 2006), which ended on September 30, 2006, total revenues were approximately $2.403 trillion. Most of this revenue was, of course, raised as a result of taxes confiscated from the American people. These taxes are, broadly and in descending order of their magnitude: individual income taxes, social insurance taxes, corporate income taxes, excise taxes, and estate and gift taxes. Customs duties and miscellaneous receipts account for only a small percentage of the federal government’s total revenue. Individual income taxes — which swelled government coffers by roughly $1.059 trillion during FY 2006 — are the most onerous. Income taxes discourage the creation of wealth, they punish success, they violate financial privacy, they are the fuel of wealth distribution and social engineering, they are the backbone of the interventionist-welfare state. And because the tax ...

Soft-Hearted Economists Need Clear Heads

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One of the issues at stake in the 2006 midterm elections was a raise in the minimum wage. Voters in six states had minimum-wage increases on the ballot, and unfortunately all of the initiatives passed. This is not surprising, however. On the surface, it appears that requiring employers to pay at least a subsistence living is the key to eliminating poverty. But economics has proven that theory wrong. To any student of economics, including the self-educated, one of the most basic tenets of economics is that the pricing system, left on its own, will inevitably allocate resources to those who place the highest value on them. When the price system is short-circuited through government intervention, as with wage or price controls, the signals get distorted. A minimum-wage law, which places a price floor on the labor rate, short-circuits the pricing system for the labor market. The first ...