Interventionism

The issue is whether current tax rates — which had been in place since 2003 — would stay the same, or whether they would go up in 2011. From this perspective, then, this has been a debate over a tax hike, not a tax cut.

The Lincoln regime destroyed the system of federalism, or states' rights, that was established by the founding fathers. After the war, the union was no longer voluntary, and all states, North and South, became mere appendages of Washington, DC.

Antitrust keeps superior products and marketing strategies from harming rivals, but halting such innovation harms consumers. It inhibits superior firms from passing on their efficiencies to consumers in lower prices.

The history of the 19th and 20th centuries has discredited the hopes and the prognostications of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The peoples did not proceed on the road toward freedom, constitutional government, civil rights, free trade, peace, and good will among nations.

Government and the media bombard us with examples of real or often just imagined threats and expand them so that they become as big as our worst nightmares. As more of us buy into an overblown story, it takes on a life of its own and often becomes the accepted truth.

Is there an alternative to this Big Brother approach to managing homeland security? I think there is: private defense agencies offering competitive services on an open market.

If the Fed had been tracking repos in 2007–2008, what they would have seen was the unfolding of the financial crisis one full year before it went critical. Instead, Bernanke stopped collecting the data because he decided to abolish M3.

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has <a href="http://store.mises.org/Democracy-The-God-That-Failed-P240.aspx">noted</a>, democracy is owned by no one. But neither is representative government. Both are marked by infantilized societies: time preference shortens, current consumption trumps wealth-producing capital formation, tax burdens increase, and government debt swells.

The claim that monetary policy has nothing to do with inflation is nothing new. The Conference Board said the same thing in 1957, and here is Henry Hazlitt's response — from his Crisis and How to Resolve It — to the notion that it is not money expansion but costs of business that is pushing prices.

If a handful of large US banks will be the major beneficiaries of the Panama Canal treaty, have they also had any role in lobbying for or negotiating the treaty itself? Or will their gains be merely a lucky windfall from decisions made by the US government for very different reasons?