Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute

Zombie Congress: The Democracy of the Dead

by Thomas Eddlem | Apr 21, 2025 | Featured Articles, Politics

How does Congress pass budget spending levels these days? It doesn’t. It’s really that simple. The federal government’s $6.95 trillion budget will spend more than $52,000 per household in America in 2025 and it is spending more than $38,000 of that without a single vote, and passing the remaining $13,000 with a single up-or-down, “should-the-government-shut-down-entirely?” vote, just like it does every year. Gen Xers grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons, with ABC-TV’s School House Rock shorts during the commercials explaining to us then-youngsters how the process of passing a law...

The Deep State Manages Elections, At Home and Abroad

by Thomas Eddlem | Apr 9, 2025 | Featured Articles, Politics

Blatant election corruption is now the rule rather than the exception across the western world, including in the United States. Elections now serve only one purpose in modern government: They perpetuate the illusion of an elected government that makes decisions. This means the “right kind” of people need to be elected, compliant politicians who will keep the corporate subsidies and bailouts flowing to the five-fingers of our fascist economy without raising too much alarm. The problem is that the voters are not always compliant in that regard, so the Deep State has created a three-step way of...

How Bernie Sanders and the Democrats Made Elon Musk the Richest Man in the World

by Thomas Eddlem | Apr 1, 2025 | Featured Articles, Politics

Just before Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) started their ongoing series of rallies against Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, Sanders stopped by Face the Nation on CBS and hilariously exclaimed in feigned outrage: “We're looking at a rapid growth of oligarchy. We're looking at a rapid growth of authoritarianism. And I fear that we're looking at a rapid growth of kleptocracy as well. And I'm going to do everything I can to work with my supporters all over this country to stand up and fight back to make sure we have an economy that works for...

You’ve Been Living Under Fascism for Decades

by Thomas Eddlem | Mar 19, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles

The late, great essayist Joe Sobran once coined the sardonic idea of what I’ve come to call Sobran’s Law, which, if I may paraphrase it, states: “The U.S. Constitution poses no threat to our current system of government.” (The New York Times wrongly worries otherwise.) Sobran observed that “The U.S. Constitution serves the same function as the British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system of power.” Whenever someone posits that the U.S. Constitution is a “living document,” they invariably mean it’s a...

Plutocratic America’s War on the Working Class

by Thomas Eddlem | Mar 3, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles

Establishment Democrats have long whined that working people pay a higher rate of combined income and payroll taxes than billionaires. They’re not wrong. Income from labor is taxed three times (payroll taxes, income taxes, and inflation) while income from capital is taxed only once (capital gains). In America today, capital gains tax is capped at 20%, but labor’s floor is 15.3% with a payroll tax, plus the 3-8% inflation tax, both of which start at dollar one. Add the income tax, which tops out at 39%, and labor is generally taxed at twice the rate of capital. The billionaire who relies upon...

A Libertarian-Left Alliance…On Economics?

by Thomas Eddlem | Jan 20, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Politics

It sounds silly; a libertarian-left alliance on economics? It's almost like the wolf and the sheep allying on what’s for dinner. But hear me out. There’s a global political realignment in the works, and it’s clearly based on stopping the military-industrial complex, "Big Pharma" and the censorship regime. Can we add to that an economic alliance with the left, on at least some issues? It sounds ridiculous, but surprisingly, there’s a lot of common ground, including at least four issues involving trillions of dollars per year. First on the docket should be inflation. While most people on the...

The Medicare Casino

by Thomas Eddlem | Jan 13, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles

Is Medicare a good program, financially speaking, for ordinary working people? Medicare Part A (the part that’s funded by payroll taxes) spent $394.6 billion in 2024 for the approximately sixty million of the over 65-years-of-age Americans on Medicare Part A (about 11.8% of the total recipients of the sixty-eight million people on Medicare are under 65 years old and generally not part of Medicare Part A). This means Medicare Part A paid out an average of $6,577 for each of its sixty million recipients in 2024. It’s important to stress that this analysis is designed to evaluate Medicare Part...

How the Captive Media Divides Us

by Thomas Eddlem | Dec 19, 2024 | Featured Articles, Politics

Most political differences in America today aren’t a result of moral differences, or even policy opinions. Rather, they are generated by divergent media consumption. There’s a huge difference between those whose news comes primarily from the corporate Big Five (CBS-Viacom, ABC-Disney, NBC-Universal, Fox-NewsCorp, and CNN-TimeWarner) and that handful of midsize legacy publications like PBS, The New York Times and Washington Post, than from those who get their news from independent media. While the independent media can be inaccurate, it's often when they contradict themselves. On the other...

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