A government that can jail the rich and well-known at will and confiscate all of their assets is a government that can do the same thing to "ordinary" people--and at a lower cost to government officials, warns William Anderson. If people really want a prosecutorial state with no limitations, they will have their wish granted--and lose whatever precious freedoms they may still have.
Whether to distract the American public from the current set of hearings into the national security breakdowns that led to the September 11 attacks or just to be doing something, President George W. Bush has announced plans to create a new Cabinet-level monstrosity ostensibly aimed at making all of us safe from terrorist attack.
The Scana Corporation is a government-created monopoly that provides electricity to most of the state of South Carolina. Like all regulated corporations, it is pressured by regulators to promote politically correct causes and policies--or else. Thomas DiLorenzo highlights the absurd results.
Even apart from Hans Hoppe's policy prescription--that private ownership ought to characterize all of society, economy, and government, while all public ownership should be banned as a form of theft--his thesis offers a highly fruitful framework for understanding everyday political affairs. Jeffrey Tucker explains.
Government bureaucracies always fail to live up to their promises because they are not market institutions. As such, there is no possible way of ascertaining how efficiently the bureaucracy is run since there are no profit-and-loss statements in the government sector, only "budgets."
The same politicians who cannot remember the names of major corporations pretend to understand accounting while they are preening before the television cameras, writes James Sheehan. If these solons really knew how misleading corporate accounting was, surely they would have acted to correct the problem before now.
Robert Murphy on the Pledge controversy: Those truly concerned about protecting individual dissenters from the tyranny of the majority should lobby for the removal of the word "indivisible" from the pledge. The classical liberal doctrine of self-determination is the only way to achieve limited government and lasting social peace.
It was September 11, and panicked customers were flocking to the two gas stations Bobbie Jean Harvey owns near Midland, Mich., to top off their tanks in case the supply of gas was disrupted. It became apparent that sales on September 11 were going to be above average. In hindsight, however, Ms. Harvey wishes she had closed her stations.
Social Security was designed as a tool of macroeconomic policy: a social arm of central planning passed in age of boundless faith in the power of the state.
