Which has more power, the tax collectors or the courts? Consider:
Sometimes when the IRS loses in court, it announces that it isn’t going to follow the court’s decision. That may sound like the height of hubris. But since the IRS operates nationwide and most courts have limited jurisdiction, the IRS can choose to keep fighting elsewhere, even if the court decision is binding in one place.
For months now we’ve warned that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was on its way to being approved. This agreement is intended to strengthen international patent and copyright protection and to fight piracy and counterfeiting–for example, by imposing on other countries American DMCA-style provisions that prohibit technology that can be used to “circumvent” DRM technologies.
My wife and I just got back from looking around at yard sales and thrift stores. One thing that always strikes me when we do things like this is the mismatch between the problems of the world’s wealthy and the problems of the world’s poor. The poor are dying for lack of material comfort–food, clothing, and shelter. Meanwhile, those of us in the West are looking for ways to rid our houses of surplus junk and our waistlines of surplus inches.
Hitler is the modern archetype of political evil, but many who condemn him still embrace his policies.
The banking system has delivered its class paper on: “what I did on my summer vacation.”
[From the Libertarian Forum, June 1971]
New Yorkers have recently had to suffer yet another irresponsible blackjacking at the hands of power-drunk labor unions. This time it was the bridge tenders and garbage-incinerator workers who, angered at the state legislature’s balking at their receiving pensions that no private industry could afford, took their frustrations out on an innocent public by not only striking but sabotaging traffic facilities.
