Free Labor Markets vs. Biden’s Push for Compulsory Unionism by Richard M. Ebeling January 29, 2021 We have now entered the Joe Biden presidency in the United States. Calling for a restored unity among the American people, the new president has come out of the starting gate with a plethora of executive orders and legislative policy proposals being sent to the Democratic Party-controlled Congress. Virtually all of them involve increased government spending, regulation, and planning over wider areas of economic and social life. Among these are political interventions in the workplace. During his first day in the White House, Biden formally announced his intention to have Congress increase the national minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour to $15 per hour. That raising an employer’s expense of hiring workers may result in some existing or potential workers being priced out of the market, especially among the unskilled and inexperienced and young, is ignored or rationalized away by those determined to follow a more interventionist policy course. (See my article “Freedom and the ...
Woe to the Libertarian Non-Unifiers by Jacob G. Hornberger January 21, 2021 The mainstream press is aglow with expressions of hope and optimism that newly inaugurated President Joe Biden will lead America out of the deep morass in which the nation finds itself. If only Donald Trump had not been elected, the argument goes, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats would have led America to the promised land by now. But now that Joe Biden, the Unifier Extraordinaire, is president, everything is going to be hunky-dory. I hate to rain on Biden’s military-lined inaugural parade but it just ain’t gonna happen. What these people still don’t get — indeed, what Trump and his Republican cohorts still don’t get — is that America is in a deep morass not because of who is elected president but rather because America has an immoral and inherently defective system. When you’ve got a bad system, it doesn’t matter who is president or who controls Congress. The bad system is going to win ...
Trump’s Fall and the Rise of the Tribal Collectivists by Richard M. Ebeling January 20, 2021 It has often been said that religious wars are the most unforgiving because one or both protagonists are absolutely, if not fanatically, certain that “the” truth is on their side. This is threatening to become the situation in America today with the ideological dogmatism seen in the mindset and extremism of the identity politics warriors and cancel culture crusaders, and their allies in the political party that has swept into controlling power in Washington, D.C. as a result of the recent presidential and congressional elections. We see that not only to the victor goes the spoils, but a vengefulness of taking advantage of the victory to seemingly condemn and exorcize all and everything viewed as part of the defeated “deplorables.” Not that Donald Trump and many in the Republican Party had not brought this down on themselves. In his manner and message from the time he began running for the office of the presidency, Trump aroused anger, shock, and contempt ...
Leftist Humor at the Los Angeles Times by Jacob G. Hornberger January 7, 2021 Leave it to an American leftist to bring some humor to our nation amidst all the chaos and turmoil, in the form of an op-ed that appeared in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. The author is a Times columnist named Nicholas Goldberg. Mind you, Goldberg didn’t intend to be humorous. He was deadly serious. It’s ...
Freedom versus Paternalism in the Coming Decade by Richard M. Ebeling January 4, 2021 We are not only standing at the beginning of a new year in 2021, but at the entrance of the third decade of the 21st century. With a fifth of this latest century now behind us, what have we learned so far? I, personally, fear that the answer to that is little that is right and true, as I ...
Non-Issues in the 2020 Election by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2021 In one of his trenchant commentaries written about a month before the election, Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob G. Hornberger asked the question, “Where Are Open Borders in the Presidential Race?” He then made these observations: Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, immigration is not a big burning issue in the presidential race. There is a simple reason for that: Both ...
Business Regulations by Laurence M. Vance December 29, 2020 Business regulations are of two kinds: government-imposed regulations on businesses and business-imposed regulations on employees and customers. From the standpoint of liberty and property, the first kind of regulation is always bad and the second kind of regulation is always good, even when the regulations are bad. Let me explain. First of all, there are government-imposed regulations on businesses. These can ...
Opponents of Liberty Remain Misguided Sore Winners by Richard M. Ebeling December 18, 2020 The 2020 presidential election has been the most divisive in many people’s living memory. Not only has there been the anger and fury over whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden should occupy the White House come January 20, 2021, there have been concerns and controversy about whether democracy itself is under attack in America. One indication of people’s concerns about ...
Another Conservative Social Security Reform Plan by Laurence M. Vance December 15, 2020 Just reading the title is enough to make a libertarian cringe. “How Social Security Reform Could Make a Popular Federal Program Better,” by Rachel Greszler and Ilana Blumsack, was published last month by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that, for almost fifty years, claims to have “advanced the principles of free enterprise, limited government, ...
Republicans and the Minimum Wage by Laurence M. Vance December 7, 2020 Republicans claim to believe in limited government, the free market, and the free-enterprise system, but their claims often ring hollow. A case in point is the outcome of a recent ballot measure in Florida. It is not just men and women who won elections in the fifty states last month. According to Ballotpedia, “Voters in 32 ...
Black Lives Matter, But Not to Everyone, Part 2 by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2020 Part 1 | Part 2 Some people argue that the solution to the problem of police abuse of blacks is to defund or dismantle the police. But that is no solution at all. That only opens the door to those who violate the rights of others through the commission of violent crimes. As we have seen in Portland and ...
Conservative Principles by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2020 Back at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis in the United States in March of this year, two Democratic representatives (Tim Ryan of Ohio and Ro Khanna of California) proposed that the federal government give at least $1,000 to every American making less than $65,000 a year. Three Democratic senators (Michael F. Bennet of Colorado, Cory Booker of New ...
