An Essential Resource for Enlightened Minds Since 1972
Some statistics cannot be understood without being set within a political framework, because they reflect politics as much as, or more than, they do reality. The unemployment rate is an example and a cautionary tale. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the seasonally adjusted official unemployment rate for February fell to a four-year… read more
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The national debt of the federal government is $16.5 trillion, $52,317.30 for every individual in the United States. The only sane and moral stance is to repudiate it entirely. “Repudiation” is not a word used by the political mainstream. Part of the reason is who holds the debt. China is often castigated as the largest… read more
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The cultural elite routinely disdain reality TV as voyeuristic garbage being churned out for the unwashed masses. But this unwashed woman is a fan of a new subgenre of the category that has become a sensation: reality capitalism. That’s not what the subgenre calls itself, of course, but that’s what it amounts to. A flood… read more
Read More CommentObama has been too quiet lately. And when he does speak, he says little of substance. For example, on the looming fiscal cliff that has America panicked, he held a press conference on Nov. 28 to urge people to tweet Congress. The only hard policy statement included was a reiteration of his well-worn proposal to… read more
Read More CommentTwo news items stress the necessity of hoarding and of doing it now. A Nov. 5 headline on NBC Connecticut announced “N.Y. Man Charged in Gas Hoarding Case” and addressed an incident from the flood zone. “According to investigators, Yunus Latif… collected money from his neighbors, bought gas at a Valero station almost 80 miles… read more
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For years, I have declared a preference for taking my chances with criminals rather than with the police. Criminals usually want my property, not to control my life or to cage me like an animal. With criminals, I can pull a gun in self-defense. Until lately, however, the average person has scowled my way whenever… read more
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I want gridlock. If the House of Representatives and the Senate both go Republican, as I expect they will, then the best chance for political paralysis may be a hostile Democrat in the White House. I want an angry Congress and a president with fingers itching to veto. Ironically, a second-term presidency for Obama could… read more
Read More Comment At the second presidential debate, President Obama trumpeted the accusation, “Governor Romney said we should let Detroit go bankrupt.” It was a reference to a 2008 New York Times editorial by Mitt Romney in which he argued against a government bail out of the auto industry and for the alternative of bankruptcy. Thus, the uncompetitive… read more
Read More CommentA huge pool of money lies just beyond the grasp of government’s itching fingers: private pension funds. Various money-grab schemes have been floated, including a legal requirement that all private pension funds contain a set percentage of Treasury bonds. The most innovative scheme comes from California, which is attempting to do an end run around… read more
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“Fiat” is money with no intrinsic value beyond whatever an issuing government is able to enforce. When it enjoys a monopoly as currency, fiat inevitably turns the free market functions of money inside out. Instead of being a store of value, the currency becomes a point of plunder through monetary policies such as quantitative easing.… read more
Read More CommentIn the Saturday Review of January 7, 1933, the famed belles-lettres author James Branch Cabell commented on Isabel Paterson’s latest novel, Never Ask the End (1933). Cabell wrote, Mrs. Paterson has made … a book which any tolerably civilized American must regard, throughout, with a sort of charmed squirming.… Here is an honest portrait.… Thus… read more
Read More Comment If you control the language, you control the argument If you control the argument, you control information If you control information, you control history If you control history, you control the past He who controls the past controls the future.” – Big Brother, 1984 The deepest form of social control is to govern what a… read more
Read More Comment It is the saddest quotation from classical liberalism. On the eve of World War I, British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey stated, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.” The lamps or lights were freedom and peace. Grey did not see them again. Today… read more
Read More Comment The encryption of computer data is one of the most powerful tools individuals have to protect themselves against an intrusive state. Encryption is the process of converting data into encoded text produced by an algorithm. To convert the encoded text back to its original form requires either a ‘key’ or tremendous effort. A key is… read more
Read More Comment In entry-level philosophy class, a professor will often present a scenario that seems to challenge the students’ perspective on morality. The argument runs something as follows: “The entire nation of France will drop dead tomorrow unless you kill your neighbor who has only one day to live. What do you do?” Or “You could eliminate… read more
Read More Comment When I look at the world writ large, it is easy to despair…and essential not to do so. With wars raging and the economy sinking, the only growth “industry” seems to be government’s power over us all. The wheels are coming off the world, and I sometimes want nothing so much as to hide my… read more
Read More Comment Why has America, a nation known for rugged individualism, descended so quickly into submission and a police state? In 1831, the French political theorist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville received a commission to examine the prison system in America. His personal purpose, however, was to examine the character of a new America to which many… read more
Read More Comment [Address delivered at FreedomFest, Las Vegas, Nevada, July 14, 2012] I am an optimist about freedom…and not just the abstract concept but living freedom in my own time. It is not that I’m mentally deficient…and it is not because I haven’t been paying attention. Every morning I wake up and browse about 20 newspaper or… read more
Read More Comment “Going Galt” refers to the process by which a productive individual removes as much support as possible or as practical from a totalitarian system without abandoning the benefits of society. When you peel the state away from your life, what you have left is society. That is, the people with whom you associate for the… read more
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I am told there is an Italian saying that translates as “It is raining again… PIG OF A GOVERNMENT!” The saying makes me wince because I can see myself raising a fist and shaking it in reproach at the drizzling sky. I spend so much time railing against statism that I risk defining myself by… read more
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“I Lived. I Died. Now Mind Your Own Business.” That’s how I want my tombstone to read. What do I have to hide? Everything! Which is to say, every piece of personal information someone demands to know is something I don’t want to tell because no one has the right to demand access to my… read more
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Last Saturday’s column distinguished between two strategies for achieving personal freedom from an invasive state: “Gulching” and “Going Galt.” Gulching, named after Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged, means withdrawing from society into an isolated community. Going Galt, named after the early strategy of John Galt in the same novel, means removing your support from the… read more
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“Globalization” has been a buzzword for decades. The word has competing definitions: It can refer to the reduction of barriers to trade and travel, which allows goods, ideas, and people to act as though the world is one free-flowing community. But it can also refer to the centralization of power into a nexus from which… read more
Read More CommentA friend once claimed that he was searching for “the Promised Gulch.” He referred, of course, to the state-free Galt’s Gulch depicted in Atlas Shrugged to which the producers of society withdraw to form their own community and to remove their support from the parasites. Galt’s Gulch is the most anarchistic aspect of Atlas Shrugged;… read more
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Black’s Law Dictionary is considered definitive on the meaning of legal terms. The Dictionary defines “privilege” as “a special legal right, exemption, or immunity granted to a person or class of persons; an exception to a duty.” It usually refers to the legal right to withhold information from authorities or to refuse to participate in… read more
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If you are an average American, then you are a repeat felon. In his stunning book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (2009), civil-liberties attorney Harvey A. Silverglate estimates that the average person unknowingly breaks at least three criminal laws each and every day. Federal statutes and regulations have become so… read more
Read More CommentJ. Neil Schulman’s 1979 novel, Alongside Night, depicts the sort of Dystopian future that leaves you shifting a bit nervously in your chair while reading. Dystopian is the opposite of utopian. It refers to an imaginary place or time in which the conditions of life are terrible, usually as the result of government oppression, nuclear… read more
Read More Comment “Simplify, simplify.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden “Simplify.” —me The most profound truths are simple ones – sometimes deceptively so. Ayn Rand proclaimed, “A is A.” Mises explained that all human action purposeful and seeks to satisfy individual goals. Libertarianism rests on one principle, “the initiation of force is never justified.” In his pivotal book, The… read more
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Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (2 vols., 1962) by Murray Rothbard is a light bulb of a book that keeps the reader clicking with insights. I am jealous of anyone who reads this book for the first time because it is a remarkable adventure that cannot quite be duplicated afterward. I… read more
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[RUSSIAN ACCENT] This is Ayn Rand speaking. Like all of the great thinkers of world history, I am dead. I have, however, returned here to criticize this conference. I do not approve of “no smoking” sections. The whole place should be designated “mandatory smoking”. But I digress. A passage from Procrustes Stretched.… I wrote this… read more
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