The government accepts no legal obligation to provide specified law enforcement services in exchange for the taxes it forcibly extracts from the citizenry. A clearly defined and voluntarily accepted reciprocal agreement between the government and the citizens has never existed.
The history of Latin America is filled with tragic stories of countries reaching great heights — Argentina and Venezuela come to mind — and then falling back to mediocrity. Chile could be next if the protesters get their way.
By abolishing the weekend, the Soviets were in one move able to strike a blow against both families and religious institutions. All that was left was the state — and state-mandated labor.
Far from being the saviors of society, the new breed of anti-market conservatives are merely the newest iteration of the long line of anti-social apologists for state domination.
The Soviets, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge — these totalitarian regimes would have failed even without any intervention from geopolitical rivals. The socialist systems would have been conquered not by standing armies, but by economics.
In his new book Judgment in Moscow, Vladimir Bukovsky claims the spirit of the Bolsheviks was never really destroyed. And it has been kept alive with Western help.
Keynes's Malthusianism indicates that he had a defective understanding of the division of labor and the law of returns. Beyond that, his population policies reveal the totalitarianism inherent in the Keynesian vision.
The African continent is exceedingly rich in natural resources, yet the living standard of Africans is very low. The most plausible explanation for this discrepancy is the lack of a system that protects private property.
One East Berliner told me there was not much difference between “freedom” in West and East Berlin because some workers in West Berlin had to commute more than half an hour by bus to get to work. Hence, they had no freedom.
