All of a sudden, we are supposed to accept 24-hour curfews “for your own safety” from people who order the police to stand down when Antifa and friends beat the Hell out of taxpayers; people who refuse to enforce laws they don’t like (death penalty, bail, property crimes).

City leaders who literally give wanted alien criminals a public heads-up when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is about to conduct raids are now telling me what’s best, declaring a death penalty for businesses, no hearings or due process?! Forgive me if I don’t fall right into line with the fascism which seems awfully situational. Governor Gavin Newsom’s suggestions yesterday that older and vulnerable people take extra care and stay inside seemed reasonable. However, “progressive” city leaders then decided to seize the opportunity and throw the whole economy into a tailspin as collateral damage, but don’t worry—we’ll soon have a government-sponsored bailout for favored groups soon, funded with a tax increase crammed down the throats of the dwindling number of taxpayers. Homeless go back to the streets, illegal alien criminals get sanctuary, car break-ins continue...

Criminals continue to be released from jail or not arrested at all, and we all become more habituated, like sheep, to the loss of liberty yet again, “for our own safety.” I’m not buying it. I don’t buy it with FISA renewal, with gun-grabbing, or with this sweeping lack of process.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed is tied to a corruption investigation of a federally-indicted city bureaucrat she dated. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo mocked Trump supporters assaulted by criminals while the police stood down. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff tips off wanted violent illegal aliens. These are the Bay Area rulers telling 7.1 million+ citizens—more than the population of many U.S. states—to stay indoors, shut down businesses? Great judgment, all of them.

Republished from the original twitter thread.

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Franklin Bynum, a 34-year-old attorney, avowed socialist, and DSA member, won the Democratic nomination for criminal court judge in Houston. At least 16 other socialists appeared on the ballot in primary races across Texas.

Many of the candidates and much of the support come from millennials, the largest generation of Americans in history. In part, millennials’ attraction to socialism can be traced back to Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist. These well-publicized movements emphasized inequalities in income, access to capital, criminal justice, healthcare, childcare, access to education, and housing affordability. Amy Zachmeyer, a 34-year-old union organizer who helped restart the Houston DSA chapter said that socialism “resonates with millennials who are making less money than their parents did, are less able to buy a home, and drowning in student debt.” Millennials’ attraction to socialism is reflected in surveys.

A 2016 survey of 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found that 16 percent self-identified as socialists, while 33 percent supported socialism. Only 42 percent supported capitalism, while 51 percent did not. Another survey, in 2017, found that 51 percent of millennials identified socialism or communism as their favored socioeconomic system. Only 42 percent favored capitalism. Jorge Roman-Romero, 24, who leads a new DSA chapter in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said, “It’s not a liability to say that anymore,” referring to calling oneself a socialist candidate.

Frances Reade, 37, is vice chairwoman of the East Bay DSA chapter in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has about 1,000 members. She enjoys the free evening classes, known as “socialist school,” where they read and discuss political texts including Karl Marx. But it is doubtful that this Marxist night school is reading about the true history of socialism and communism in practice, which has brought more human suffering and death to the world than any other socioeconomic system.

For example, DSA chapters should read “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?” by University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors, which tells the story of socialism that Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America won’t tell and that millennials don’t hear. Here is an extended excerpt:

The goal of socialism was to reap the cultural, scientific, creative, and communal rewards of abolishing private property and free markets, and to end human tyranny. Using the command of the state, Communism sought to create this socialist society. What in fact occurred was the achievement of power by a group of inhumane despots: Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Mengistu, Ceausescu, Hoxha, and so on, and so on . . .

No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: “No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into.” Until that happens, there is no “after socialism.”

The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. We insisted upon “de-Nazification,” and we excoriate those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never has been and never will be a similar “de-Communization,” although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, and although those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down ninety-year-old men because “the bones cry out” for justice. In the case of Communism, we insisted on “no witch hunts”—let the dead bury the living. But the dead can bury no one.

Therefore the dead lie among us, ignored, and anyone with moral eyes sees them, by their absence from our moral consciousness, spilling naked out of the television and movie screens, frozen in pain in our classrooms, and sprawled, unburied, across our politics and our culture. They sit next to us at our conferences. There could not have been an “after Nazism” without the recognition, the accounting, the justice, and the remembrance. Until we deal with the Communist dead, there is no “after socialism.”

To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.

This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind....

The bodies demand an accounting, an apology, and repentance. Without such things, there is no “after socialism.”

In a 1989 interview, Sanders said: “Socialism has a lot of different messages to different people. I think the issue of socialist ideology and what that meant or means is not terribly important.” Perhaps it’s not important to Sanders, but it was to the tens of millions of people who died at the hands of socialists or who currently toil under such regimes in Kim Jong-un’s North Korea and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela.

A 2014 United Nations report on North Korea listed the conditions that ordinary citizens face in North Korea: “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial, and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation” (p. 14). Two million to three million people are believed to have starved to death in North Korea in the 1990s, including “deliberate starvation” of political prisoners.

Venezuela’s government has practiced socialism since 1998. The result is an annual inflation rate today of 9,000 percent, an economy that shrinks 15 percent annually, empty shelves, crushing poverty, a fleeing population (10 percent of the population has emigrated), 12 percent of children under five suffer from malnutrition and a socialist president who prohibits outside aid, even from the Vatican. At the recent FEEcon 2018 conference in Atlanta, a young violinist from Venezuela, Wuilly Arteaga, talked about being beaten by government agents for publicly opposing his country’s despotic government.

So millennials, this is what socialism looks like in practice and where concentrated government power inevitably leads. As the old adage warns: A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take away everything you have. That includes life itself.

Bernie Sanders and members of the Democratic Socialists of America choose to “step around the Everest of bodies . . . without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.” By giving socialism and communism intellectual cover and acceptability, Sanders and the DSA help to hide the bodies and hide the truth from millennials, who have few memories of the atrocities and are likely unaware of socialism’s full record. Rather than being a Utopia, socialism and communism in practice create a hell on earth.

The post Hey Millennials: Here’s the Truth About Socialism, Kim Jong-un, and Nicolás Maduro appeared first on The Beacon.

Are you starting to see a pattern?

Many people continue to perceive the presence or impending advent of socialism here, there, and everywhere and to lament the prospect. But full-fledged socialism is almost extinct. Aside from North Korea, hardly any country now has socialism’s essential attributes: government ownership, management, and direct control of all the major means of production; central planning of resource allocation and income distribution; and an almost complete absence of private property rights except for very small properties and some personal items. Almost all countries on earth now permit major elements of private property, combined with extensive government intervention and regulation of private property use and extensive taxation, subsidization, and government provision of a variety of “public goods,” “welfare,” infrastructure, and many other types of goods and services.

Moreover, almost all countries have elections of public officials; hence the term I’ve used for more than 30 years (borrowed from my Ph.D. student and friend Charlotte Twight), “participatory fascism.” (Never mind that the elections are often rigged and fraudulent.) Moreover, many countries have established institutions for permitting aggrieved citizens a measure of due process in contesting the government’s treatment of their persons and property and allowing them a public voice in expressing their preferences for government action. (Never mind that this ostensible due process is largely spurious.)

This type of regime, amigos mios, is clearly the wave of the future. Unlike full-fledged socialism, which leads to totalitarian rule, mass poverty and economic decay, participatory fascism not only placates people’s wish to participate in the formal process of government decision-making, but also permits private entrepreneurs enough room for maneuver that they can in some cases get rich; also enough that they can keep national output at a tolerably high level and in some cases even generate positive economic growth. Hence this system, even if it contains the seeds of its own destruction, does not destroy itself nearly as quickly as full-fledged socialism does. And meanwhile the politicians and their cronies who dominate the system smile all the way to the bank.

The post Socialism Is Dead; Participatory Fascism Has Triumphed appeared first on The Beacon.

With all the voices warning of the rise of fascism in America, it would serve us well to define fascism to ensure we understand each other and can discuss the matter with intelligence and civility. Our friend Sheldon Richman is helpful on this point with his thorough entry in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Here is an excerpt:

As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. . . . Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism –”blood and soil”–for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism. . . .Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. . . . Under fascism, the state, through official cartels, controlled all aspects of manufacturing, commerce, finance, and agriculture. Planning boards set product lines, production levels, prices, wages, working conditions, and the size of firms. Licensing was ubiquitous; no economic activity could be undertaken without government permission. Levels of consumption were dictated by the state, and “excess” incomes had to be surrendered as taxes or “loans.”

Trump is undoubtedly a nationalist and protectionist and proudly declared during his inauguration address that he would put “America First.” Inasmuch as nationalism is a critical ingredient of fascism, it is indeed present. But notably absent from the Trump agenda is cartelization of American business, planning boards, or control of economic activity or consumption. Instead, Trump seeks to reduce government regulation, has imposed a hiring freeze on federal agencies, and advocates cutting taxes–the lifeblood of the state.

While there are many criticisms one can raise about Trump and certain of his policies, fascism is not one of the them. Unfortunately, fascism has become a label attached to anything a speaker does not like. Modern use of “fascism” is empty and imprecise. If you want to criticize Trump feel free to do so—but please offer reasoned arguments rather than lazily labeling the man as something that he clearly is not.

* * *

For lessons for reimagining American politics to foster liberty and truly representative governance, please see the Independent Institute’s widely acclaimed book: Crossroads for Liberty: Recovering the Anti-Federalist Values of America’s First Constitution, by William J. Watkins, Jr.

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That lesson is lost on most politicians and all special pleaders who support re-authorization of the taxpayer-financed Export-Import Bank, whose funding is once again set to expire at the end of June 2015. The Ex-Im Bank is a poster child for crony capitalism. The list of the major beneficiaries of its subsidies and loan guarantees is headed by Boeing, Caterpillar and other large U.S. corporations, none of which need privileged access to the common pool resources of the federal budget to sell their products overseas. The Ex-Im Bank allows foreign airlines and mining companies, among others, to buy capital equipment from U.S. manufacturers on the cheap, thereby gaining advantages over their rivals in the global marketplace, many of which, like American and Delta airlines, are headquartered in the United States. Subsidies to exporters at the expense of ordinary American taxpayers not only distort competitive market forces, but, insofar as they help Boeing and hurt U.S. commercial airlines, also are morally indefensible.

I once told Mercatus’s Veronique de Rugy in person that if fiscally responsible commentators like us cannot kill the Ex-Im Bank, we cannot kill any other profligate federal spending program that delivers special benefits to politically well-organized lobbyists, paid for by you and me.

It is past time for all Americans to stand up against all systems of preference and restraint. Although many other for opportunities for opposing Washington’s expansionism could be put on the table, the pending re authorization of the Ex-Im Bank is a good place to start.

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For the past three weeks, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, the third installment of the popular dystopian trilogy, has reigned at the top of the national box office. I finally had the pleasure of seeing the film last weekend. Although one reviewer has criticized Mockingjay – Part 1 for being “unnecessarily protracted,” other viewers including myself understand that the penultimate chapter is saving the main action for the franchise finale. Overall, I was pleased that the third film continued to build upon the atmosphere and themes of Suzanne Collins’s bestselling books, thanks to strong performances by the stellar Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss Everdeen), Woody Harrelson (Haymitch), Julianne Moore (President Alma Coin), Donald Sutherland (President Coriolanus Snow), and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (Plutarch Heavensbee).

Many commentators have already discussed and analyzed the series’ underlying socio-political themes. Various interpretations have been embraced by the Left, Right, and everything outside and in-between. It’s likely that the deliberate ambiguity is what allowed for the series to become a political Rorschach inkblot with universal appeal. But broadly speaking, at least to me, The Hunger Games trilogy seems to contain a libertarian message that highlights the moral worth of the individual and resistance to oppression, tyranny, and centralized control over daily life.

Although the story never specified the kind of political economy that characterizes Panem (the post-apocalyptic land of what used to be North America), my impression from reading the books and watching the films is that it is some form of feudalism. A tyrannical central authority, the Capitol, exercised total control over twelve defeated Districts that are best thought of as vassal states. A disarmed populace was reduced to complete serfdom under the ruthless Capitol, which maintained a monopoly on all the weapons and technology. Without any means of resistance, there was no option for the people but to submit and obey.

Each District was forced to produce a specialized good or service, according to Capitol mandates, and to pay (literal) tribute every year. The futility and stupidity of a planned economy were on full display with the resulting mass poverty and thriving black markets. In fact, black markets were portrayed in a very positive light as the protagonist Katniss made a living selling poached game to acquire essential supplies. Even under the worst social conditions, people were willing to engage in voluntary exchange, flout regulations imposed by the State under the pain of death, and seek to improve the lives of their fellow human beings.

The last book in The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay, contains profound lessons on the reality of war and revolution. After surviving a second ordeal in the Hunger Games and seeing her hometown firebombed into oblivion by the Capitol, Katniss joins the underground resistance movement, led by the once-hidden District 13, and agrees to be its symbol of rebellion, “The Mockingjay.” With a subtle nod to filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the rebels and Capitol engage in a massive propaganda war with Katniss at the focal point. Much of the recent film adaptation focuses on this aspect of the plot to the chagrin of some viewers. But George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin praises this emphasis:

It enables us to feel the moral ambiguities of propaganda and the manipulation of public ignorance, even when done in a good cause.... The portrayal of District 13 effectively evokes its oppressive socialism (even more than in the book), while also giving some nods to fascism and militarism. One speech by President Coin even includes veiled references to two lines associated with the Nazis (“One people, one nation, one leader,” and “Today Germany, tomorrow the world”).

From the very start, the lofty ideals and better life the rebels promised seem elusive and suspicious. District 13 is a garrison state where every good is rationed and every aspect of daily life is regimented. (As Ludwig von Mises observed in his critique of nationalism and militarism, “Within a militarist community there is no freedom; there are only obedience and discipline.”) In addition, District 13 shows no signs of a functional legislature or an independent judiciary, just the one-person rule by the charismatic but Machiavellian President Coin (I’m pretty sure the symbolism surrounding her name was intentional). Also, it is unclear that the rebels enjoy popular support among the people of Panem. (Why else would District 13 invest so much time and resources on propaganda, if not to bolster its perceived legitimacy?)

The late Gordon Tullock applied public choice theory to shed light on societies characterized by violence. I believe his insights also apply to the fictional revolution in Mockingjay. In one prominent analysis, “The Paradox of Revolution,” Tullock points out that revolutions suffered from a collective action problem: For a rational individual, the risk of death or punishment exceeds the expected benefits, participation is unlikely to have much influence on a successful outcome, and he or she can free ride on any potential successful outcome without being an active participant. Most importantly to Tullock, “the discounted value of the rewards and punishment is the crucial factor.” In other words, to convince a rational individual to take part in a fool’s crusade, he or she must perceive that the private benefits far outweigh the costs.

On a similar theme, Tullock also notes that most revolutions are actually carried out by insiders against other insiders. He throws cold water on the romantic view of revolutions typically mythologized in the trope of a downtrodden people rising up against an oppressive tyranny, emerging triumphant in a just struggle, and establishing/restoring a noble republic with their victory. In Tullock’s words, the real story goes more like this:

[I]n most revolutions, the people who overthrow the existing government were high officials in that government before the revolution. If they were deeply depressed by the nature of the previous government’s policies, it seems unlikely that they could have given enough cooperation in those policies to have risen to high rank. People who hold high, but not supreme, rank in a despotism are less likely to be unhappy with the policy of that despotism than are people who are outside the government. Thus, if we believed in the public good motivation of revolutions, we would anticipate that these high officials would be less likely than outsiders to attempt to overthrow the government.

From the private benefit theory of revolutions, however, the contrary deduction would be drawn. The largest profits from revolution are apt to come to those people who are (a) most likely to end up at the head of the government, and (b) most likely to be successful in overthrow of the existing government. They have the highest present discounted gain from the revolution and lowest present discounted cost. Thus, from the private goods theory of revolution, we would anticipate senior officials who have a particularly good chance of success in overthrowing the government and a fair certainty of being at high rank in the new government, if they are successful, to be the most common type of revolutionaries.

In Catching Fire and Mockingjay, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, Plutarch Heavensbee, is the prime example of a double agent/insider who takes on a prominent revolutionary role and ends up in a comfy, high-ranking position in the new regime after the war.

But whatever Katniss’s political beliefs and other motivations may be, it is apparent that most of her actions throughout the series are driven by a selfless love for her sister Prim. In her desire to see Prim protected at all costs, Katniss sacrifices herself for the Hunger Games, survives against all odds, and sets off a chain reaction that eventually leads her to become a reluctant participant in the rebellion in Mockingjay. Once the war begins, all bets are off.

Near the end of Mockingjay, after the rebels win their Pyrrhic victory and the new government starts to take hold, one revealing conversation between Katniss and Plutarch highlights the brutal truth of realpolitik:

“Are you preparing for another war, Plutarch?” I ask.

“Oh, not now. Now we’re in a sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated,” he says. “But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss.”

Maybe. But in our species’ short time on Earth, any proclamation of “the war to end all wars” is at odds with human nature and the lessons of history. The story’s author, Suzanne Collins, having come from a military family, understood these fundamental insights and incorporated them into her writings. Mockingjay vividly illustrates the risks and uncertainties of using violent revolution for regime change. “Power tends to corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as Lord Acton rightly recognized. Many Mockingjay readers were upset about its dark ending, but this unflinching realism is needed to drive the message home. The costs of war, even for a righteous cause, could never be fully accounted for. Physical and psychological scars are permanently seared onto the survivors.

The last book in The Hunger Games trilogy makes it dramatically clear that revolutions usually end up substituting one tyrant for another. If there is but one takeaway from this haunting series, it is that putting hope in a political savior is foolish.

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Andrés Duany, by Knight Foundation – flickr: urban planners look at Biloxi plans, CC BY-SA 2.0, no changes made, Wikimedia Commons

It goes by many names: “sustainable development,” “smart growth,” “transit-oriented development,” to name a few. But development projects built under the banner of “sustainability” share the same elements: high-density residential housing and high-intensity commercial space (so-called mixed use) clustered near capital-intensive mass transit lines surrounded by government-owned “open space” and, increasingly, government-imposed “urban growth boundaries.” Regardless of where a sustainable-development project is located in the world, each tends to apply these elements.

There is nothing wrong with high-density housing or non-automobile mobility per se. The problem is that sustainability advocates use government to force their vision of tomorrow on others and, equally important, use government to restrict or eliminate alternative visions from being adopted. Individual private-property rights and local decision making give way to the priorities of international, national, state, and regional governmental bodies influenced by urban planners who believe their vision of the next 50 to 100 years is the correct vision and the only vision worth pursuing. Anyone who thinks differently, according to the planners, is wrong, selfish, wasteful, or all three, and must be silenced.

If you think this description is exaggerated, watch this chilling video of Andres Duany speaking to the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council on why it should support his Seven50 plan. Mr. Duany is the chief architect of Seven50, the proposed 50-year regional development plan for seven counties in Southeast Florida, including Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. Mr. Duany is a leading urban planner, author of The Smart Growth Manual, and a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which seeks to end suburban sprawl. After watching this video ask yourself: Do I want to support the so-called “smart-growth” approach and empower Andres Duany and people like him to rule over me and my community using government force? Or do I want to strengthen my private property rights and ensure local control over housing, land use, and transportation issues?

*I thank Mark Gotz of the American Coalition 4 Property Rights for bringing this video to my attention after I spoke at the American Dream Coalition’s 10th Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado, September 19-21, 2014. The American Dream Coalition is a nonpartisan organization fighting back against government threats to mobility and affordable homeownership.

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But is this necessarily the case? Would things really be so different if different people were in power?

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek addressed this very question in one of his most famous works, The Road to Serfdom. One chapter of the book is titled, “Why the Worst Get on Top.” In it, Hayek responds to the immensely popular idea that the ills of socialism could be avoided. Although most people found “extreme” forms of socialism (Nazism, fascism, etc.) to be repugnant, it was thought that the particularly nefarious parts of these systems could be avoided. An “American socialism” would certainly look very different than the Soviet regime. Hayek challenged this notion. He argued that the very nature of the system would ensure that the worst came to power. Those who would become political leaders would be those individuals who sought power and were willing to use violence and other coercive methods to achieve their goals.

Hayek offered three reasons why the leaders of a system tending toward totalitarianism would consist of the worst, not the best, individuals. First, he argued that in order to obtain a “high degree of uniformity in outlook,” we have to look to a group of people with low moral standards. Second, in order to obtain and maintain power, leaders in the system must gain the support of the gullible and “those whose passions and emotions are easily aroused.” Third, in order to bring together supporters, leaders will unite people behind a “common enemy.”

Hayek goes on to say that the survival of a totalitarian system depends on the willingness to supplant the needs of the collective over the needs of the individual. He states,

The principle that the end justifies the means...becomes necessarily the supreme rule. There is literally nothing which consistent collective must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole.’....Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow out of necessity.

...

The worst sufferer...is the word “liberty”....‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases.

Hayek’s points are still relevant today. Though few would argue for Soviet-style central planning, there are many who advocate centralized planning in the form of foreign intervention and domestic programs. They place their trust in the bureaucratic apparatus of government to achieve some larger goal. As Hayek points out, the actions of these leaders is often justified to the public via emotional appeals and some idea of the “collective good.” The result is detrimental to liberty.

Take for example a recent interview with retired General Stanley McChrystal. In it, he argues that American youth should be expected to do “a year of service.” Further, he suggests that jobs and educational benefits should be tied to such activities. Why? Because self-sacrifice will “bind” young people to one another and “the nation.” Individuals should sacrifice their liberties in the name of the “greater good” as envisioned by the political and military elite.

Without a doubt, the world is experiencing some scary things. Ukraine is imploding. There is an Ebola outbreak in Africa. Syria is engaged in civil war. Iraq is in turmoil. There is a chance the violence could resume in Israel. But it’s important to remember that it’s not a matter of who is in political office, who runs the military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, or who heads the humanitarian mission in Liberia and the rest of Africa. The issue is more fundamental. Those who will seek out those positions are the ones who gain the most from being there. As Hayek pointed out, those are likely the last people we would want.

Though we may not be able to outright alter the institutions that influence political actors, perhaps there is something individuals can do. As citizens, we take responsibility for ourselves. Individuals must champion personal liberties. Each of us has the choice to think critically and to value the rights of the individual over some notion of the “greater good.” It may be small, but it’s a first step in ensuring we protect our freedoms from the “worst on top.”

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