The time is now for American libertarians to get together and publicly broadcast “the solution.” It is my belief that almost all long-time libertarians agree on this solution with perhaps slight variations. The internal debate is mostly in the practicality of the solution, not in the principles of the idea. And the idea of course is for voluntary and private police forces to compete freely with other private police forces whose sole job is to provide conflict resolution, peace, and protectionThe Law – Frederick Bastiat https://fee.org/media/14951/thelaw.pdf and audio here...
Bastiat
How Libertarians Can Create Order From Chaos
The aftermath of George Floyd's murder has ushered in a grisly scene of terror for many. All around the country police are attacking peaceful protestors while ideological opportunists loot and riot, destroying private property and burning down cities. As emotions run high and polarization continues to divide the country, libertarians find themselves bickering over the binary laid out before them by statists of all stripes—are cops the bad guys? Or are the looters the bad guys? Yes! For decades libertarians have railed against police and the abuse of power that runs rampant among their...
Cuomo’s Wager
Pascal's Wager is a familiar idea. It goes something like this: regardless of what you may think about the existence of God, rational cost-benefit analysis says you should sign on. After all, if you do and you're wrong, what have you lost? But if you don't and you're wrong, uh oh -- you're in big trouble, buster. (I'm not saying this makes sense, by the way.) Something similar has gone on with the coronavirus pandemic and the draconian economic policies embraced by many governors in the United States, best exemplified New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. They have...
The Unseen Consequences of the Coronavirus Response
While sicknesses and death mount from the coronavirus pandemic, the responses by all levels of government have been overwhelming. School closings, business closings, cancellations of sporting events and concerts, “stay in place” orders, hysterical panic spread by the corporate press, and massive government “stimulus” and bailout plans have all been justified as a means to save lives and “flatten the curve” of the spread of the virus so the healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed. These efforts have been made in an attempt to head off what some are predicting would be a historic mass pandemic...
China’s Economic Schemes Hurt the Chinese Most of All
In his State of the Union Address—February 4, 2020—President Trump outlined his reasons for punishing nations that manipulate their economies in order to achieve some internal policy goal, such as China. The president claimed that such manipulation was unfair and harmful to its trading partners. His main concern is that by manipulating its economy China "steals" jobs. It does this in several ways: By keeping the yuan at a lower exchange rate against other currencies—meaning that the People's Bank of China gives more yuan for each dollar than would occur in a free currency market—Chinese...
“Rules of Origin” Show Why Trade Agreements Aren’t Free Trade
Ludwig von Mises famously argued that people must choose between outright socialism and unfettered capitalism, because there is no coherent “middle ground” between the two. The allegedly reasonable compromise of a highly interventionist state — where the authorities retain nominal private property but issue edicts regulating how legal owners may use their property — is unstable. Mises argued that one round of interventionism invites consequences that are even worse than the original problem, leading to yet more interventionism. During the debates over Obamacare, I pointed out just how...
When Billionaires Want to Get Rid of Capitalism
"Successful economies are not jungles, they’re gardens, which is to say that markets, like gardens, must be tended, that the market is the greatest social technology ever invented to solving human problems, but unconstrained by social or democratic regulation, markets inevitably create more problems than they solve.” These are the words of Nick Hanauer, a self-described capitalist. And a billionaire. He was an early investor in Amazon.com and founded Aquantive Inc., which was purchased by Microsoft for $6.4 billion. More recently, he has been receiving a lot of attention as a “thinker.”...
Economic Creationism
Creationism has lost the argument in the public square. Any biologist working to understand life-related phenomena has no choice but to take seriously Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. That is, all of the apparent design and purposefulness that we observe in the biosphere, from a bird’s wings to a shark’s fins to a human brain, came about by a long but steady series of gradual changes in unbroken genetic lineages. Amazingly, Charles Darwin (as well as Alfred Russell Wallace) discovered his elegant explanation of the biosphere’s apparent design without knowledge of the...
Andrew Yang – The 21st Century Candlemaker
"(Close) all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds—in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses.” -Frederic Bastiat from his work 'The Candlemakers’ Petition' Frederic Bastiat creatively used satire as a vessel in order to explain somewhat complex and philosophical beliefs. In The Candle Makers Petition, he illustrates how special interest groups, (the candlemakers and tallow producers at the time attempted to lobby the Chamber of Deputies of the...
On “What Must Be Done”
In most schools – public and private – children are brainwashed into believing that the federal government is not only benevolent, but that it protects the individual’s life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness. Though that was the original intention of the country’s founders, space need not be wasted to elaborate on how the malignant State has not only deviated from that plan – to say the least – but has deftly and progressively persecuted the individual since the nation’s limited government was established. Making matters worse, Americans cheer on the growth of the State, via...
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