The big argument for an income tax increase now is one taken from Lord Keynes: during a boom the government should raise income taxes in order to “sop up excess purchasing power” and prevent inflation. There are many fallacies in this argument for a tax hike.

On any definition, “slavery” means forced labor.

One of the most heartening developments on the current American scene is the new nation-wide organization, Business Executives Move for a Vietnam Peace. These dedicated businessmen came from all over the country to meet at the Statler-Hilton in Washington on September 27, to form their organization and expressed their determined and cogent opposition to the war in Vietnam.

H. Rap Brown, fiery young leader of SNCC, has been indicted in Cambridge, Maryland for the “crime” of “incitement to riot” There are few of us who have sat down to analyze what exactly this “crime” is supposed to be. Suppose that Mr. A tells Mr. B: “Go out and shoot the mayor.” Suppose, then, that Mr. B, pondering this suggestion, decides it’s a darn good idea and goes out and shoots the mayor. Now obviously B is responsible for the shooting. But in what sense can A be held responsible?

Every time someone is conspicuously shot in America, every time some maniac starts splattering people with a rifle or machine gun, various propagandists move in to whip up hysteria and call for severe government restrictions on the purchase or possession of guns. Never mind that such laws and ordinances are clearly unconstitutional, for the Constitution clearly and flatly guarantees the right of the people to bear arms.

General de Gaulle has been reviled, derided, and hooted at by the entire American press for getting up in Quebec and shouting, “Vive le Quebec Libre” (Long Live a Free Quebec!). For the American mind seems totally incapable of understanding the principle of secession or the desire of an oppressed ethnic minority to separate and liberate itself from the tyranny of the majority. In the United States everybody laughed and called de Gaulle a senile, doddering old fool; but in Canada, and above all in Quebec, nobody laughed.

Conservatives and libertarians alike suffer from a failure to recognize who is responsible for the accelerating march of this country into statism. Ayn Rand once wrote that big business is “America’s most persecuted minority.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Conscription is quite obviously the most blatant example of slavery in American life, and happily many voices from both Left and Right are now being raised to call for abolition of this unmitigated despoiler of liberty. But there are other critical and pervasive examples of slavery on the American scene that have, for some reason, gone unnoticed even among dedicated libertarians.

The draft — and the military — are the most obvious and blatant examples of slavery in American life today. But there are others — and these areas suffer a great deal more neglect. One all-pervasive example of slavery in present-day America is the enslavement of our children, known as compulsory attendance laws.

Why the wave of adulation and admiration that greeted the blitzkrieg war of conquest by Israel against the Arab countries? That greeted the conquest, that is, in the United States; most of the rest of the world was stunned and appalled. Has a sickness eaten its way deep into the American soul? Do we all simply love a winner — even if he wins by means of fire-power, surprise attack, and mobile blitzkrieg tactics? Even if he wins, as Israel did, by napalming innocent women and children in Arab villages? Have we lost all sense of moral principle, all sense of justice?