In recent years, many Western countries have introduced legal duties to promote equal outcomes or “equity,” under the auspices of anti-discrimination and human rights law. For example, Canada has an Employment Equity Act, which aims to implement “the principle that employment equity means more than treating persons in the same way but also requires special measures and the accommodation of differences.”

Every major financial regulation eventually produces the market it was trying to prevent. The Investment Company Act of 1940 was sensible enough in its original intent. Its practical effect, forty years later, was a capital drought: private equity and venture capital firms were legally capped at 100 investors, choking off funding for the growing businesses that needed it most.

[This article is based on an earlier essay published in German at “Wirtschaftliche Freiheit,” but has been abridged, revised, and adapted for an international audience.]

The catastrophic socialist experiments of the 20th century rest on a critique of capital. Economics should take this seriously and recall that capital theory is, at its core, also about questions of freedom and unfreedom. Economists would do well to re‑examine these issues in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises.

[Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution by David Stove (Encounter Books, 1995; xv + 345 pp.)]

Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D) said ... “Let my people go. I’m deada‑‑ serious. If you’re constantly beating on us, let us out.”

The federal income tax, which we recently paid, is the crown jewel of a massive welfare-warfare state. Without it, it would be well-nigh impossible for the government to run up some 37 trillion dollars of debt. (It’s actually much more but the government does the counting).

As kids we may remember the old trope—often seen on TV or in movies—where a stronger kid would overpower a weaker kid and use the weaker kid’s hands and arms to hit him, asking mockingly, “Why are you hitting yourself?”