Neither party will cut government in a way that is desperately needed. Instead, they offer a left- or right-tinged Americanized socialism or fascism. One promises domestic expansion and foreign reduction; the other promises foreign expansion and domestic reduction. The inevitable compromise: expand both domestically and internationally.
In addition, whatever the new president does will make our growing economic problems worse.
Thomas Paine was more than a pamphleteer for the cause of the American revolution. He was a serious political philosopher, as this excerpt from The Rights of Man demonstrates. In many ways, he anticipated the insights of Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek.
“A great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It had its origin in the principles of society, and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished.Do We Want Free Enterprise by V. Orval Watts is an exciting challenge issued to business in 1944. He points out that business is not necessarily a friend of free enterprise. True free markets would mean an end to cartelizating regulations, tariffs, business subsidies, and every form of privilege that business has learned to love throughout the New Deal period. In some ways, he writes, free enterprise represents a challenge to business that it would rather avoid completely.
Nationalism appears to be a modern phenomenon having its origin in the nationalities constituted in Europe between the 16th and the 19th century concomitantly with the disappearance of feudalism and of the Romano-Germanic Empire that came into being with Charlemagne and was totally liquidated with the unification of Italy.
In fact, however, the spirit of nationalism is very ancient. It has been and still is present as a factor in both political and economic history. The only thing that has changed is its form.Imagine my surprise yesterday when I flicked on a kitchen radio with the hope of catching some Mozart to accompany my doing the dishes, only to hear a fey British voice saying the following:
As Murray Rothbard described one of their favorite lines of attack,
The free-market economy, they charge, is “the rule of the jungle,” where “survival of the fittest” is the law. Libertarians who advocate a free market are therefore called “Social Darwinists” who wish to exterminate the weak for the benefit of the strong.
With his latest, rather forlorn call for banks to help solve the mortgage crisis by ‘forgiving’ just enough of their loans to keep people’s inability to service their full contractual obligations from triggering foreclosure proceedings, he truly has gone all the way back to Solon and his 6th century answer to Athen’s very own sub-prime crisis, the ‘seisachtheia’ - or ‘shaking off of debts’
A piece of mine posted here: “To compare politicians with entrepreneurs is like comparing two runners in a race, one who stands at the starting line and makes a speech, and another who runs the full distance around the track without saying a word.”
If you click on the link and comment there, it might encourage the editors to run more pro-market stuff.
[Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action. By George Weigel. Doubleday, 2007. 195 pages.]
