Pelosi’s Principles

New House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulatory monster at the top of her list of things to tackle in January 2007. Well wait, isn’t this exactly what the Dems are in favor of? A massive regulatory state that hogties big business?

What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other

Who are the classes respectively endowed with the rights and duties of posing and solving social problems? William Graham Sumner says they are as follows: those who are bound to solve the problems are the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable, educated, and healthy; those whose right it is to set the problems are those who have been less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for existence. The problem itself seems to be, How shall the latter be made as comfortable as the former? To solve this problem, and make us all equally well off, is assumed to be the duty of the former class; the penalty, if they fail of this, is to be bloodshed and destruction.

My Money, My Choice

Will the indignities of the government never cease. Take your IRA for example - your savings for that stormy day when your earnings equal your bar bill - not including chips. Here’s the government still extending its open palm. YOUR IRA, YOUR money. And yet the state, backed by the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines demands that at 70 and a half years of age you must take a mandated percentage of your savings. Not 68 years of age, not 69 and a half, not 71 and three fourths, but 70 and a half.

The Business of Government

Rothbard asks: Have you ever heard of a private firm proposing to “solve” a shortage of the product it sells by telling people to buy less? Certainly not. Private firms welcome customers, and expand when their product is in heavy demand thus servicing and benefiting their customers as well as themselves. It is only government that “solves” the traffic problem on its streets by forcing trucks (or private cars or buses) off the road. According to that principle, the “ideal” solution to traffic congestion is to outlaw all vehicles! And yet, such are the suggestions one comes to expect under government management.

What Really Happened at Plymouth

Murray Rothbard tells the true story of the Plymouth Colony. “The first successful settlement in New England was something of an accident. By 1617 the Pilgrims had determined to leave the Netherlands, where their youth were supposedly being corrupted by the ‘licentiousness’ of even the Calvinist Dutch, who, for example, persisted in enjoying the Sabbath as a holiday rather than bearing it as a penance. In mid-December 1620 the Mayflower landed at Plymouth. In a duplication of the terrible hardships of the first Virginia settlers, half of the colonists were dead by the end of the first winter. A major reason for the persistent hardships, for the ‘starving time,’ in Plymouth as before in Jamestown, was the communism imposed by the company.”

Big Brother is Looking Out for You

A few weeks ago, Big Brother wanted to make sure my friend and I were good citizens.

My friend, Colin and I, had just finished eating dinner and were going to see Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (which, by the way, lets you draw your own conclusions, but for me was evidence of how contemptible the state and its wars are) when we got in his car and he drove off to the movie theater.

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