President Joe Biden’s decision to posthumously pardon Marcus Garvey has been met with widespread acclaim in the United States and across the global black diaspora. Garvey is revered as an iconic black nationalist and Pan-Africanist thinker, celebrated for his vision of racial uplift and economic self-sufficiency. However, his legacy is far more complex than the hagiographic portrayals suggest.
How many times have you seen a politician, businessman, union, or activist group clamoring for the government to do something on the grounds that it will improve the public weal? “We need higher minimum wages to benefit the working class,” a union official says.
On the night of the Boston Tea Party in 1773, American insurrectionists donned disguises and destroyed a shipment of tea imported by the East India Company. The protestors boarded privately owned ships in the harbor and threw the tea overboard. Later that night, the activists discovered another tea shipment that had been unloaded at a warehouse. Not content with having destroyed most of the company’s import, they broke into the warehouse and destroyed that tea, too. The total damages amounted to more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars.
Most Americans realize that our federal government has, in recent decades, spent so recklessly that it runs ever-increasing annual federal budget deficits (currently nearly $2 trillion) and now sits on over $36 trillion in outstanding federal debt. This spending—overseen by Congress and the Executive branch—has been profligate since the 1960s Great Society, wars in Vietnam and the Middle East, the 2008-09 financial crisis, the ongoing Obamacare entitlement, and the 2020-22 Covid pandemic.
The latest figures published by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are staggering. $75 billion saved in two weeks. Some of the items they have slashed are astonishing, including payments to transgender musicals in Ireland, DEI in Serbia, or decolonization of curriculum vitae. This is a two-week result, so it should be applauded. However, there is a lot more that needs to be done.
Neoconservatism was born out of former Trotskyites that became anti-Communists at the end of the Second World War. After the campus protests and student movements of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, their repulsion to the waving of the Little Red Books and protests at Ivy League schools shifted these New Deal Truman Democrats into the hands of the Republican Party.
Rothbardian libertarianism upholds liberty as an ethical and moral standard, and for this reason it is often criticized for being idealistic and utopian. Addressing this critique, Duncan Whitmore argues that the mere fact that we live in a statist society, in which all our liberties are under siege does not mean the fight for liberty is a lost cause.
[This article is adapted from “Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United States.”]
Writes “GS”, in response to recent articles on federal contractors and federal employees:
Onsite observations of civil servants and their contractors I found what I believe to be averages:
25% hard workers and people of integrity like are found everywhere
50% that are average to below average
25% that are useless as in not working at all and visiting with their friends who are doing the same. There are also certain protected categories who know they are protected and act accordingly. Use your imagination here.
