It’s May Day—International Workers’ Day—a time for us to celebrate the workers of the world, who, as Marx told us, had nothing to lose but their chains and therefore would inevitably mount a worldwide revolution to throw off the hated capitalist system that had forged their chains. But something happened on the way to...
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Everyone, it seems, has a hollow space in his makeup. Perhaps he has no faith, no hope, no charity; no sense that he is basically a lord or a priest or a peasant; no comfort in knowing his personal latitude and longitude in the great scheme of things; no ethical compass to give him...
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Libertarian anarchists are the Rodney Dangerfields of the ideological universe. Born and reared in a world pervaded by the state and statism, we must fight our way through a dense jungle of clinging, collectivist vines, obscured by murky, mendacious propaganda, and populated by brainwashed lizards, political opportunists, and a multitude of wormy moochers. If...
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For thousands of years, philosophers have argued that society must invest great power in the rulers because only great power can hold back the forces of evil—violence, plunder, and disorder. They have often conceded, of course, that this solution does have an unfortunate aspect, namely, that with great power, the rulers themselves may resort...
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There are now many more libertarians in the world than there were fifty years ago. Libertarian writing has increased greatly, and the readership of libertarian literature has increased substantially, especially since the development and widespread adoption of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Yet, it seems to me, we no longer have libertarians...
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A is for Alzheimer’s Disease. If you eat lots of vegetables and floss your teeth, you will live a long time and get this condition as your reward. B is for Baconator. If thou shouldst ever eat one, thou shalt surely die. C is for Crumbling Infrastructure, an incantation government officials mutter when they...
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As a rule, libertarians incline toward wishful thinking. They constantly pluck little events, statements, and movies from the flow of life and cry out, “Eureka! Libertarianism is on the march!” With some of my friends, this tendency is so marked that I have become amused by its recurrent expression—well, there he goes again! Some...
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Since the earliest stage of human history (say, the time of Cain and Abel), human beings have been homicidal maniacs. Yet, for untold ages, something was missing, something with the capacity to raise their murderous mania to truly magnificent heights. Only very late in human history—perhaps 10,000 years ago or thereabouts—did the long-awaited breakthrough...
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Economists and other social scientists have a long history of conducting analyses based on cross-sectional international data. Sometimes these studies examine a handful of countries; sometimes they examine scores of countries. The studies with the larger samples are, it seems, generally viewed as more solidly based than those with smaller samples. It is common...
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In 1913, exactly a century ago, the United States was a flourishing, economically advanced country. Its real output per capita was the world’s highest. It produced a great abundance of agricultural products and was a leading exporter of cotton, wheat, and many other farm products. Yet it also had the world’s largest industrial sector,...
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