Well, after years of raising our taxes through deficit spending, the Bush administration has released a plan to raise our taxes in a variety of other ways. The attack on the mortgage interest deduction is probably the most alarming among them.

I got a little surprise today reading John Leo’s NY Daily News column, “It’s ‘72 All Over Again for Dems.” Leo focuses on what he believes are the parallels between the failure of welfare liberalism, circa 1972, and the failure of liberalism in the post-9/11 era. He cites Austrian economist and libertarian social theorist Murray Rothbard at one point:

For 40 years, my father worked for the Rochester Telephone Company, almost 30 years as a foreman / manager. During that time, he was never absent due to sickness. This is not because he was never sick, but because he went to work even if he was sick. He first started working there several years after his immigration from Germany, where he’d been trained in technical electronics at a trade-school.

Please help the Mises Institute make Rothbard’s For a New Liberty available again! It is a complete libertarian manifesto: ethics, economics, history, politics, law, and society--all in one book.

Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levellers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.”

Less than a year after a Tsunami killed approximately 275,000 people in the poorer part of Asia,1  another 80,000 have died in Pakistan and India from an earthquake that hit on 8 October 2005.

Francis Dumouchel employs Rothbardian logic to defend vampires—satire indeed.