How has the vision of our forebears—of men and women, black, white, and every other complexion, standing tall, shoulder to shoulder, in free and full access to equal opportunities and enjoying the blessings of equal rights in the sanctity of our persons and property—devolved to skirmishes among dependent subjects of the state over the...
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Mary’s post perfectly exposes the key problem with these progressives. No objective moral standards. No basic respect in human dignity. One thing that troubles me about the political climate is just how extensive this moral bankruptcy is. Glenn Beck did a service in demonstrating the collectivist ethical situationalism of progressives to a whole generation...
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In a post at The Beacon two days ago, I called attention to President Barack Obama’s executive order issued last Friday, March 16, which relates to the fact that, to quote my post’s title, “the specter of centrally planned economic fascism continues to hover over the United States.” In my post, I noted that the...
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Last week I posted a blog about crony capitalism, with the suggestion that crony capitalism is undesirable. The next day Vice President Joe Biden was bragging that he and President Obama support crony capitalism, as if crony capitalism is a good thing. Mr. Biden was criticizing Republican presidential candidates for their opposition to the...
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During World War II, the U.S. government created and operated a system of fascist central planning. (I have described this system in my books Crisis and Leviathan and Depression, War, and Cold War.) After the war, much of this system was abandoned, but it was revived in large part during the Korean War, and...
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Economic policy issues often divide on “pro-business” and “pro-government” arguments, with the pro-government side arguing that we need big government to correct the failures of the market, regulate business activity, and stand up to crony capitalism. The problem with this pro-government view is that crony capitalism inevitably comes with big government. In a democracy...
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In Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, businesses push government to pass law after law that aids weaker businesses by penalizing successful ones. There’s the “Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule” to prevent destructive competition among firms in an industry, and the “Equalization of Opportunity Bill” that limits the number of businesses one person can own....
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I posted earlier about the provisions of the New Years Eve-signed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) a/k/a the “Homeland Battlefield Bill,” allowing the President of the U.S., at his or her sole discretion, to order the indefinite detention of any U.S. citizen, with no burden of proof whatsoever, and no recourse for the detainee—in...
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A story by Matthew Wald in the New York Times on January 9th demonstrates the poverty of governmental attempts to pick “winners” in the realm of green technologies, the wasteful subsidy programs supporting that policy goal and the huge costs for the private sector of being unable to march to Washington’s tune. Among its...
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Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed here by Thomas Woods on “The Peter Schiff Show.” Dr. Higgs discusses how the federal government prolonged and deepened the Great Depression of the 1930s that lasted until after World War II when such policies were either ended or radically reduced. Moreover, the current attempts at central-government planning...
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