The measures of inequality on which analysts, policymakers, and armchair pundits typically lean may be misleading, argues Art Carden. Even when measures of real income tell us otherwise, the real differences in income and wealth generated by the free market may be much smaller today than they were 100, 50, and even 10 years ago. So maybe "inequality isn't growing fast enough" for some—it doesn't appear to be growing at all.
Shopping at a mall, joining a country club, or working for a business are not rights. Remember that before you get angry at not being able to stay at the mall, not being able to play golf at Augusta, or not getting hired because you don't look the part. In order for something to be taken from you or denied to you, it must be yours in the first place.
Some freedom-minded people pin their hope for liberty on withdrawing from an unfree world. We might refer to this as "economic secession." Despairing of advancing the cause of liberty in society at large, they hope to be able to secure their own liberty anyway. This approach is doomed to fail, write Paul Birch and Gene Callahan.
I expected better of John Milbank. He is a theologian of great distinction, the leading theorist of the influential Radical Orthodoxy movement. Would not so profound a thinker offer us illuminating ideas on economics?
Our age is dominated by the state and its errors. The state has given us recession and war, while liberty has given us prosperity and peace. Which of the two paths prevails in the end depends on the ideas we hold about freedom, capitalism, and ourselves. May we never forget the great truth: tyranny destroys, while liberty is the mother of all that is beautiful and true in our world.
"War... is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror... Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys."
A contributing problem of the 1990s economic boom was ideological, and it is one that still persists in the aftermath, writes Christopher Mayer. It was a cultural error that made a hero out of a Fed Chairman and that put so much faith in the Fed to begin with, at the expense of sound economics.
When some left-wing acti-vists recently began their What Would Jesus Drive? campaign against sport utility vehicles, the first reaction of most folks—and especially libertarians—was a simple, "Are these people really serious?"
It is slowly dawning on people that to understand George W., one must understand his religious impulses, which all evidence suggests are intensely important to him. His views are no different from that of the typical evangelical who absorbed his faith from the American Baptist culture. But they merit closer attention when they are held by an arrogant man with his finger on the button and who is contemplating total war.
