Is there any hope in the Western World that individual citizens can win some release from the relentless and imprisoning growth of government? In the US, government spending, a reasonable proxy for their power over us, increases every year, except for a few minor blips. The citizens’ situation becomes more and more dire.
The FBI released new homicide data this week, and at the nationwide level, the 2017 homicide rate fell slightly, dropping to 5.3 homicides per 100,000 from 2016’s rate of 5.4.
The furor over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is spurring many commentators to bewail that the Supreme Court has become too powerful. But the real problem is that the Court is now often little more than a fig leaf to provide legitimacy for a Leviathan that would have mortified the Founding Fathers. The Court’s betrayal of its constitutional role has vastly increased the stakes for the current and any future Justice nomination.
When pundits and activists look at life expectancy data, they often find that the US has a lower life expectancy at birth than other wealthy countries. The common response is to then immediately assume that the United States must have lower life expectancy rates because it lacks so-called “socialized medicine.”
Tonight Joseph Salerno will join The Sabrin Center for Free Enterprise at Ramapo College of New Jersey for a panel looking back at the 2008 financial crisis. The event is focused on the questions “Why it happened, how it happened, could it happen again?” It will begin at 7 pm ET and will be streamed live.
Other speakers will include:
The Left has become increasingly and often bizarrely obsessed with all manners of supposed privilege these days. Buzzfeed even put out a quiz on how much privilege you have. All of these various privileges work to form a simple Marxist-like dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressor. So for whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, cisgendered, able-bodied and attractive people are all at least privileged if not part of an oppressor class.
It seems like the media will never stop promoting the myth that public school teachers are “underpaid.” The most recent example is the front-page story in Time, “This Is What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in America.”
In a free society, income and wealth gaps are driven by variations in skill, knowledge, talents, independence, creativity, drive, and willingness to take risks. People who are satisfied with safe and secure occupations — like economics professor, school teacher, nurse, dentist or tax return preparer — expect to have much less wealth and income than risk-taking individuals who successfully capitalize on splendid ideas that result in products and services that benefit all of society.
A recent article in American Affairs by Cass Sunstein illustrates a cast of mind that poses a great danger. Sunstein is a legal academic, well-known for his work in behavioral economics. In his book Nudge, written with Richard Thaler, he informed us of the benefits of having experts like him “nudge” us into making choices that they regard as good for us. In “An Anatomy of Radicalism,” he shows in a clear way the blind spots of his way of thinking.
