It's strange how most people are willing to give the police and the courts the benefit of the doubt and pretend as if the system somehow knows something that we do not know. Anyone hauled off to jail, they believe, probably deserved what is coming to him.
Krugman dismissed the idea that Keynesianism was best suited for totalitarianism and he ignored my inquiry about the fact that the mess we are in is precisely because the US government has pursued Keynesian policies for the past eight decades.
Libertarians have not come to promise human beings a technocratic utopia; we have come to bring everyone freedom, the freedom of each individual to pursue whatever his or her dreams of the future may be. Or even to have no vision of the future.
Recorded at the Ludwig von Mises Institute; Auburn, Alabama; 9 October 2010.
Mencken saw the implications of where his thinking was leading him and he acknowledged those implications frankly. "I am," he wrote in <em>The Smart Set</em> in 1922, "a libertarian of the most extreme variety."
How often do you hear the minarchist say, "Well, I don't like government, but we at least need things like traffic laws. We need a government to keep us safe"? What if we actually began to publicly advocate the abolition of traffic regulations?
Regardless of their relative merits, bribes are a phenomenon distinct from taxation and regulation. Examining where and to what extent illicit bribes exist sheds further light on the distinction between the private, voluntary economy, and the public, coercive one.
Obama says that the key to progress is good government. Not so. The real common thread to progress is free enterprise. Progress and prosperity have followed movement toward freer markets and secure property rights.
