What's to be said about people who grieve over the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza at the hands of the U.S.-backed Israeli military while simultaneously cheering the Mengele-style wrecking of children's lives in America and elsewhere at the hands of "transgender" fanatics? And vice versa.
The famous line "We have met the enemy and he is us" is from Walt Kelly's comic strip, Pogo. Kelly adapted the line from a U.S. naval commandant who, during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, reported to his superior, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Kelly did the parody for the first Earth Day in 1970, a pro-state, antimarket, antihuman occasion. More constructively, we can apply Kelly's slogan to a bigger matter, namely, who's to blame for the bad policies that representative democracy turns out? Is the culprit an elite group of politicians, bureaucrats, and Big Business/Big...
With great sadness I note the passing of David Boaz today, June 7, 2024, at age 70. He had been ill for some time. He was a good man and a giant of the libertarian movement. Very much because of David's influence and example, libertarian organizations not only embraced a rigorous dedication to individual liberty, private property, free markets, and peace, but also a commitment to professionalism. He is one big reason libertarianism moved from amateur status to the big league. The value of his multifaceted work, predominantly for the Cato Institute for over 40 years, can not be overstated....
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, the Austrian-school economist who learned from Carl Menger and taught Ludwig von Mises, speaks to the ages. We ignore his lessons to our peril. One hundred ten years ago, in a journal article titled "Control or Economic Law," he wrote: [J]ust as natural phenomena are governed by immutable eternal laws, quite independent of human will and human laws, so in the sphere of economics there exist certain laws against which the will of man, and even the powerful will of the state, remain impotent; and that the flow of economic forces cannot, by artificial interference of...
According to research conducted by Phil Gramm, the late Robert Ekelund, and John Early, documented in The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate and summarized in this video: The bottom 20 percent of households have an average annual income of $13,000, according to the Census Bureau. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those households consume an average of $26,000 worth of goods each year. How can that be? In the standard computations of inequality that are used to justify more government spending, the incomes of the rich include taxes paid while...
I talk about immigration with Michael Liebowitz on The Rational Egoist.
“Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself.” --Ernest Renan
Democracy: the matching up of people who want free stuff with politicians who promise free stuff. Problem: free stuff as they all imagine it does not exist. However, it does exist in the market, as explained by Frédéric Bastiat in Economic Harmonies, chapter 8, "Private Property and Common Wealth." See my discussion of that chapter.
