My 2016 book, Lines of Liberty, brought together the words of many who have been most important in the defense of liberty over the years. But it only included those who had already passed on.
Since, then, a few stalwarts of liberty have died. Tibor Machan may have been the first, only a couple months after I completed my book. Since his insights are well worth remembering, I thought his March 18 birthday would be an appropriate time to do so.
In my latest Mises Wire article, I argued why I believe the State—or, for that matter, the collectivity—has no right to coerce individuals into taking vaccines. However, let’s assume someone retorted as follows: “Ok, I agree the State has no right to impose vaccinations upon citizens; that said, if one person (say, A) does infect another one (say, B), then the former has aggressed against the latter—and therefore needs to compensate for the damage done.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 2021 will be the second year in a row in which the federal debt exceeds Gross Domestic Product (GDP). CBO also projected that this year’s federal deficit will be 2.3 trillion dollars, which is 900 billion dollars less than last year. However, CBO’s projections do not include the 1.9 trillion dollars “stimulus” bill Congress is likely to pass.
When economic crises hit, most pundits and intellectuals never see it coming. That is because they have never learned the lesson that Bastiat sought to teach, namely that we need to look beneath the surface, to the unseen dimensions of human action, in order to see the full economic reality. It is not enough just to stand back and look at points on a chart going up and down, smiling when things go up and frowning when things go down. That is the nihilism of an economic statistician who employs no theory, no notion of cause and effect, no understanding of the dynamics of human history.
