The justification given for "QE2," another round of quantitative easing, is of course the threat of deflation. But if we actually look for ourselves, we see that prices are not falling — not that it would be bad if they were.
What if a president took a different direction and sought popularity by expanding rather than reducing liberty? There is a model here they could follow, but it is not one you have thought of. It is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A parent who puts a child behind a loom for ten hours a day does so, not out of callous greed, but because this is what brings food to the table. Economic development is the precondition for all that is good and humane.
The new ecofascist short film "No Pressure" is a beautiful example of the environmentalist movement's dropping its pleasant-looking mask and joking about its true authoritarian nature. People explode into a bloody mess when they decline to participate.
Just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn.
Bernanke's remarks were long and ponderous, Fedspeak plus excerpts from a typical intermediate-macroeconomics textbook. One thing this newest piece of Fedspeak surely won't do is give us maximum employment and price stability.
Everywhere we find some warlike tribe of wild men breaking through the boundaries of some less-warlike people, settling down as nobility and founding its state. The goal is always the same: exploitation.
Life in a stateless society will sometimes be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious. But the outcome in a society under a state will be much worse.
It seems needful to remind everybody what liberalism was in the past, that they may perceive its unlikeness to the so-called liberalism of the present. Most people have lost sight of the truth that in past times liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus state coercion.
Under socialism, the costs of one person's decisions are spread equally throughout society, to the point that that individual hardly feels the penalties of his value judgments — short of illness and death.
