Robert Fogel died a few days ago. He was a prominent figure in the academic economic history profession for five decades, virtually from the time he burst onto the scene with the publication of a polished-up version of his Johns Hopkins Ph.D. dissertation, Railroads and American Economic Growth, in 1964. This book was the...
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A funny thing happened to Jay Gatsby on the way to the Silver Screen in 2013: He became a sympathetic and all too human capitalist. This may not have been Hollywood’s intent, but the most recent adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic may have elevated a minor sub-theme in the book to a new...
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The United States government was founded on the principle of protecting individual rights. The Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...” People have rights as individuals, and do not derive their rights from...
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Propose that the state be replaced by genuine self-government and immediately people come forth with a litany of objections—your proposal is a pipe dream; it is untried; it would never work; it fails to solve problem R and problem S; and so forth. So the objectors, however much they may concede that the state...
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State power is the most dangerous force in modern life. State rulers, seeking their own aggrandizement and enrichment, employ this power systematically to plunder and abuse their subjects. Of course, they cannot act in this way without the assistance of many others, among whom some assist willingly, some in return for adequate compensation, and...
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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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The school rated “America’s Most Challenging High School” by the Washington Post is about to get an extreme makeover. With the surrounding Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) producing a drop-out rate double that for the rest of California, the American Indian Model Charter School clearly poses an embarrassment to the OUSD’s unionized teachers and...
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It seems simple enough. Publicly available evidence shows two young men implicated in the horrific massacre in Boston this Monday, the shooting of the officer at MIT, crimes against others, and violent resistance against the police. One brother is dead and the other on the lam. And so the police have locked down Boston,...
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I suspect that most readers of The Beacon tend to favor personal freedoms to a sufficient degree that they will immediately agree with the title of this post. If we want to live in a free country, freedom has to mean that we are free to make choices that others, including others in positions...
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Finally, some sanity, and from a somewhat unexpected source. The ACLU is concerned about the civil liberties implications of the new Harry Reid Senate bill to establish so-called “universal background checks” for firearms purchases. The organization has tended toward silence on gun rights, but at least now it recognizes aspects of the problem with...
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