Is it wrong that all I can see while watching the firework shows is taxpayer money going up in smoke?
As much as I enjoy fireworks, I can't help but find it angering the way the 4th of July is nothing more than some hollowed out, almost sarcastic joke of a celebration. The whole tradition of celebrating freedom in America has turned into the government taking our taxpayer money and burning it in a spectacular show of largess on the taxpayer's dime.
Being innocent does not matter. Not being arrested or convicted of a crime is no protection. With amazing ease, the government can take everything you own. And to recover it, you must prove your innocence through an expensive and difficult court proceeding in which a severely lowered standard of evidence favors the government. This is civil asset forfeiture.
Russell and Patricia Caswell of Tewksbury, Massachusetts, know the process well. For the last two years they have battle... (more)
The Department of Energy, which is the Supreme Court of your home appliances, thinks you might be wasting precious energy. And the bureaucrats have a plan for doing something about it. They want to take away the clock on your microwave oven. You know, that's the little digital display that we oddly depend on to tell us what time it is.
The bureaucrats say find some other way. Use your smartphone. Buy a wristwatch. Better yet, use a sundial. Whatever you do, just remember: The gove... (more)
Mystification is the process by which the commonplace is elevated to the level of the divine by those who have a vested interest in its unassailability. Government is a perfect example of mystification at work. Government is a group of individuals organized for the purpose of extracting wealth and exerting power over people and resources in a given geographic area. Ordinarily people object to and resist thieves and robbers; but in the case of government, they do not because the government has cr... (more)
It really doesn’t matter which way the Supreme Court ruled on President Obama’s healthcare mandate. As long as the government is involved in healthcare, there is going to be an endless series of interventions, leading ultimately to a total government takeover of the entire healthcare arena.
For months, we have seen conservatives obsessing over the mandate, suggesting that the defeat of the mandate would be some sort of gigantic victory for economic freedom.
If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought New York Times columnist David Brooks was having a laugh at our expense. Alas, Brooks means every word of his column titled “The Follower Problem,” as anyone who reads him regularly will realize.
“I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem,” Brooks laments. “Vast majorities ... (more)
Contrary to outraged cries from Republicans that it’s some sort of radical departure from our “free enterprise” system, Obamacare is in fact a direct continuation of the bipartisan neoliberal consensus of the past thirty years. The guiding principle of this consensus is the use of state power to protect corporate profits — which consist mostly of rents on artificial scarcity — from the radical deflationary effects of technologies of abundance. In the spirit of the original American state capital... (more)
As most every American knows, we now live in a country in which the ruler possesses the unfettered power to assassinate his citizens. What an extraordinary situation. Who would have ever thought that America would end up with a governmental system in which the ruler possessed such omnipotent power?
Equally extraordinary, our ruler just happens to possess a powerful military and intelligence force (the CIA) to exercise such power whenever he wants. In fact, it’s the most powerful... (more)
Do you notice a pattern when dealing with any aspect of the government at nearly any level? We all have. There is a certain cast of mind at work here. This is my attempt to frame it up and identify its main features.
Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably waste your time, annoy you and attack your dignity, and finally just prove to be totally ineffective at accomplishing the task, there's a good chance that it involves the government. ... (more)
The Associated Press recently reported that half of all new college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed. These fresh-faced bachelor-degree holders are finding themselves opting for waiting tables and serving coffee just to pay off a trillion dollars in student loans. They are coming to grips with a lie perpetuated by university professors, faculty unions, and politicians that delu... (more)
A recent New York Times op-ed entitled Pinched and Griping in Iran by Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof shows how differently statists think in comparison to us libertarians, especially when it comes to foreign policy and moral principles.
Kristof is traveling in Iran and reporting on his experiences in the country. In his arti... (more)
Lew says accurately if you'd have listened to Rand during his first run you'd know he said specifically he wasn't a libertarian. He says there is only one Ron Paul, Rand is the best there is in the senate but he's not Ron Paul.
Growing up in the Cold War, we tended to look at Russia as a nightmare slave society that was utterly and completely foreign to anything Americans knew or could possibly know absent some kind of invasion.
If I were to summarize the propaganda message of the time it would be this: We are free, they are not, and that's why we are rich and they are poor. And, man, did they look poor to our eyes. I could never understand it: How the heck does a once-great people put up with a governme... (more)
If you want to see a look of stunned silence on the face of a drug-war proponent, ask him the following question: To win the war on drugs, what do you propose be done that hasn’t already been done during the last forty years of drug warfare?
He won’t know what to say. Everything that drug-war proponents have proposed has, at some point or another, been tried.
Yet, here were are some 40 years after President Nixon declared “war on drugs” and still no “victory.” In... (more)
Those were the words of President Obama that unleashed a torrent of political hysteria. The Romney campaign immediately blasted him for suggesting that things are just hunky-dory, and he was right to do so, given the terrible slog we've been through and given that there seems to be no end in sight.
But the Romney response also missed the really telling point of Obama's remarks. The revealing thing about Obama's comment was not th... (more)
According to a front-page article in today’s New York Times, Mexico’s top presidential contenders are signaling a shift in how Mexico intends to fight the drug war. While the movement is in a positive direction, unfortunately it still doesn’t go far enough. Mexico should just end its entire participation in the drug war. It should legalize drugs.
Jack Hunter claims Rand Paul “had” to endorse Romney. Mike Adams claims Rand Paul is lying in his endorsement in an attempt to insert himself into a position of power. An article on the D... (more)
Be sure to watch the Jack Hunter video if you want a good laugh. - Chris
[Professor Hans Hermann Hoppe is Interviewed by MisesInfo on his new book, "The Competition of Crooks," which explains the true nature democracy.]
First of all, Mr. Hoppe, thank you for taking the time to give us this interview. You have written in your new book, Der Wettbewerb der Gauner (“The Competition of Crooks”), that “We don’t need a European super state... (more)
There is this idea in our society that has been bred into us through the media, government schools and culture, where law must line up perfectly with traditions and social convention. If something is frowned upon or taboo, you can rest assured that there is someone out there who thinks that it should be illegal.
When a particular activity or behavior starts to bother people in the kinds of societies that we have today, all too often those people are very quick to suggest that the... (more)
I never tire of looking out the windows of airplanes. For all of human history until just about the day before yesterday, no living person saw the world like this. People could climb up to the top of mountains and see the valleys below. But to see that whole view looking straight down was the privilege of birds and God. Then about 100 years ago, this changed and we could see what we never really experienced directly.
It's not raw nature that enthralls me. It's cities. It's the sma... (more)
In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals: “the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of ... (more)
There have been a fair number of references to the subject of "phyles" in this publication. But it occurs to me that I've never discussed the topic myself in any detail. Especially how phyles are likely to replace the nation-state, one of mankind's worst inventions.
Now might be a good time to discuss the subject. We'll have an almost unremitting stream of bad news, on multiple fronts, for years to come. So it might be good to keep a hopeful prospect in mind – although I hate to u... (more)
There's a national park close to my house that has a large lake and all the swimming accoutrements left over from the 1970s. It's a nightmare for any "safety Nazi." The water is very deep. A diving board is very high and slippery, even slightly broken. There is no lifeguard on duty. If you dive incorrectly and get the wind knocked out of you, you could easily drown. The distances in the lake are deceiving. The shore looks closer than it is. If you are swimming in the middle of the lake, and find... (more)
America has been overrun by control freaks. Once upon a time the United States was considered to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave", but today there are millions of laws, rules and regulations that tightly regulate our daily lives. Most of these laws, rules and regulations were established by people who believed that they had "good intentions", but at this point the nanny state has become so oppressive that it is strangling the life out of us. If you look back throughout hist... (more)
