A “right” that requires “government” permission is not a right, but a government-granted privilege. A “right” that legislation can negate is not a right. And yet most of the pro-freedom movement goes to great lengths to ASK those in “government” to please not violate our rights. FULL ARTICLE

An income tax is inconsistent with the historical definition of freedom. Today in America government has a claim on every person’s labor, just as feudal lords, the government of that time, had claims on the labor of serfs and nineteenth century plantation owners had on slaves. FULL ARTICLE

The drug war is based on a repugnant assertion: that you do not have ownership over your own body; that you don’t have the right to decide what you’ll do with your body, with your property and with your life. The position of the drug warriors is that you should be in jail if you decide to do something with your body that they don’t approve of. FULL ARTICLE

My mind turns to thoughts of possible retribution when I see the sick policies of the last administration dragging on. Differences mingle between the two parties as the distinctions betwixt the two once held sway, now fade into the quest for power, greed and pay offs, bail outs and ravenous spending. FULL ARTICLE

Featured Post for 04/17-04/23: When sports fans are asked to come out and “root for the home team”, there is an unspoken benefit for those who have an economic stake in the team’s existence. We recognize this benefit but regard it as their “fair share”, our share being the vicarious enjoyment of “our” team. Our enthusiastic participation in this rooting example is a local form of jingoism. Continue reading →

The Bush/Obama bailouts require serious investigation.  Were these bailouts necessary, or were they a scam, like “weapons of mass destruction,” used to advance a private agenda behind a wall of fear?  Recently I heard Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a member of a congressional bailout oversight panel, say on NPR that the US has far too many banks.  Out of the financial crisis, she said, should come consolidation with the financial sector consisting of a few mega-banks.  Was the whole point of the bailout to supply taxpayer money for a program of financial concentration?  FULL ARTICLE

The costs of the Great War were truly astronomical. As with the number of stars, the final accounting is in God’s hands. The slaughters, the treasure, the faith in some kind of order of society – all of these were costs of the war. As Wilfred Owen suggested in his terrible poem “Strange Meeting,” the culture of Europe seemed hell-bent on trekking away from progress toward something that literary historian Paul Fussell would later call the troglodyte world: a kind of Hobbesian vision, one might say, rendered in pen and ink by Otto Dix. Costs indeed. FULL ARTICLE

The great failing of the Obama administration is that it is packed with people who show no apparent knowledge of the essential truths of liberal theory. That theory — which is the core of the American political contribution to, and the driving force of, modernity itself — is that freedom is the foundation of and the reason for social and economic flourishing. All evidence suggests they know nothing of this. FULL ARTICLE

After ignoring and downplaying the inflating credit bubble for much of his first two years in office, this week Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke emphasized, in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, that no economic recovery would occur unless the financial system was restored. He was quite correct in his belated diagnosis. His prescriptions, on the other hand, are much more dubious. FULL ARTICLE

The Fed is now pledging to reveal to the public more about its economic predictions, and calls this greater transparency.  This is little more than window-dressing, at best, utterly useless at worst.  Many analysts, especially those familiar with the Austrian school of economics, saw the current economic crisis coming years ago when the Federal Reserve was still telling the American people their policies were as good as gold.   FULL ARTICLE