Life's Inanities and Ironies

Last week's Supreme Court ruling striking down the ban on corporate and union spending at election time is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, removing a legal barrier to free speech is always a good thing in itself. Government shouldn't dictate who can speak or from where people may get their information. This is more than a matter of abstract freedom; it's also a practical matter. More contentiousness in politics is better than less. Free-wheeling debate is more likely to produce good outcomes than a controlled flow of information. But there is a downside to the ruling that we should freely acknowledge. If history and recent times are any indication, big corporations and unions will use their new freedom of political speech to promote bad ideas. By "bad ideas" I mean proposals for more government interference with our lives and liberty. (Not that the spending ban kept them from doing that in other ways.) It's a great myth that businesses, especiall...

Wednesday night, I suffered through Mr. Obama’s speech . I noticed the overarching theme was: in 2010, the administration will finally getting around to all it promised for 2009, as well as a whole other year worth of miracles. He begins by taking credit for saving the economy from a second Great Depression. “[W]e acted, immediately and aggressively. And one year later, the worst of the storm has passed.” Except for the massive unemployment, which he notes in his next breath. Wasn’t the worst of the storm the pain of the American people? Or was it the so-called credit freeze that Mr. Obama seems to imply is still happening: “[W]hen you talk to small-business owners in places like Allentown, Pennsylvania, or Elyria, Ohio, you find out that even though banks on Wall Street are lending again, they’re mostly lending to bigger companies. Financing remains difficult for small-business owners across the country, even though they’re making a profit.” Here’s another thing that doesn’t add up fo...

The dust is settling on the rejection of President Obama's government and corporate takeover of American Medical care. But lovers of liberty must remain vigilant for attempts to compromise that will actually create the same problems for Americans. Obamacare was always about one thing only: control of medical care and medical spending by parties outside of the patient-physician relationship. Sadly, there are many in the Republican party who support the same thing: control by third parties. They will be now be tempted to pursue these "cost control" measures -- to satisfy their own special interests and to appear to offer "solutions" for political reasons. They will be making a mistake and the American people must reject compromises of principle for political expediency. Obamacare's core elements fell into two broad categories: 1) covering the "uninsured" and 2) controlling medical costs. "Universal coverage" has been a holy grail of Statist...

It is one thing to know something intellectually, and quite another to see it suddenly happen before your eyes. I experienced such a moment in 2005, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when I watched (via the Internet) as police officers went door-to-door in New Orleans neighborhoods, forced law-abiding citizens into the streets, cuffed them, and then searched their homes for firearms before leaving them bewildered and helpless. There were no warrants involved. No probable cause was mentioned. No charges of wrong-doing were filed. Intimidation and brute force were the order of the day. And as much as I wish I could believe otherwise, I'm afraid that what we saw in New Orleans is merely a preview of coming attractions. Since September 11, 2001, the federal government has been busily advancing preparations for the day when it might impose martial law throughout the United States, thus presenting us with the specter of the sort of thugery we witnessed in New Orleans being carr...

In his extraordinary book Democracy: The God that Failed , Hans Hermann Hoppe points out that the process of civilization is stopped when government continually violates property rights. The natural process of civilization comes through delaying consumption, saving, and building capital. Undoing it leads to higher societal time preference. When natural disasters strike or a gunman robs you in an alley, "the effect of these on time preference is temporary and unsystematic," Hoppe explains. Victims are entitled to defend themselves against the individual aggressor and prepare themselves for the calamities of the occasional act of God. Resources will be reallocated to defend one against potential robbers, and provisions will be made for potential natural disasters. However, when government aggresses, it is considered legitimate and "a victim may not legitimately defend himself against such violations." Democracy legitimizes this government aggression because the violen...