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.
The combination of collapsed pensions and accounting scandal is operating like the collapse of a dam, unleashing a torrent, not of water, but of hatred--hatred of capitalism and its most visible and valuable representatives: big businessmen. George Reisman counters propaganda with analysis.
There is a way out of the current economic mess, writes William Anderson: Stop the government merry-go-round. Malinvested resources must be permitted to be liquidated, government spending must be cut back, and the central bank must not try to "reflate" the currency or the stock market.
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.
As soon as Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party gained power, the average tariff rate was quickly raised from a nominal 15 percent to 47 percent and higher, and remained at such levels for decades after the war. South Carolinian John C. Calhoun's free-trade arguments, as eloquent and advanced as they were, were no match for a federal military arsenal.
The common thief has the decency to leave you alone after he takes your money. But, society's biggest thief, government, steals money, calling it taxation, and then lurks in the shadows to tell its victims what to do, calling it regulation. And, in Las Vegas the government goes one step further, it taxes, it regulates and then competes head to head with private enterprise in the city's largest industry, tourism.
Foreign policy from Truman to the Reagan exacted a huge toll on American prosperity, diverting resources and expanding the government's grip on national life, writes Karen De Coster. A new book by Derek Leebaert sizes up the actual price that we paid for granting government military planners and their connected industries a blank check.
Since 1997, the federal government's office space has expanded by 280 million square feet. The average American family homestead is 2,100 square feet. The massive Empire State building fills 2.1 million feet. Thus, in only five years the federal government's physical size has grown by 134,000 single family homes or 90 Empire State Buildings.
Arthur Andersen's transgressions have opened the doors to unbridled regulatory madness, writes Karen De Coster. The effect of legislation (like CARTA) will be to replace the oversight bodies that currently watch over the accounting profession with regulators who will do an even worse job of it.
Any manager of a private trust fund who would dare to spend the funds entrusted to him and replace them with his IOUs would face criminal charges, writes Hans Sennholz. When the U.S. Treasury does it, it is called "creative financing." But there is a price to be paid.
