Topic: Government

What’s New is Old: The Left Turns Originalist

– June 10, 2021

“The New/Old Antitrust Paradigm would reverse the presumption of legality in mergers and acquisitions, placing the burden of proof on economic actors to want to do…well, almost anything. Any economic restructuring of a business is contingent on obtaining the permission and chop of the appropriate bureaucrats and, incredibly, other ‘stakeholders’ such as competitors and labor organizations.” ~ Michael Munger

READ MORE

New Leak of Taxpayer Info Is (More) Evidence of IRS Corruption

– June 9, 2021

“What’s especially disgusting is that the Biden Administration wants to reward IRS corruption with giant budget increases, bolstered by utterly fraudulent numbers. Needless to say, that would be a terrible idea, and sadly, Republicans in the past have been sympathetic to expanding the size of the tax bureaucracy.” ~ Daniel J. Mitchell

READ MORE

Gerontocracy and Geezernomics

– June 9, 2021

“Most babies born today will (one hopes) live to see at least the opening of the 22nd century. Why should some self-interested geezers with ‘one foot in the grave’ born before the mid-20th century be able to diminish the quality of their lives?” ~ Robert E. Wright

READ MORE

The Super-Rich Are Not Who You Think They Are!

– June 9, 2021

“The work of Scott provides a powerful illustration of the importance of the qualification proposed by defenders of the super-rich. It is not wealth that is problematic, it is wealth generated by muting the forces of the market process (i.e. by rent-seeking). In other words, the policies that produce inequality matter!” ~ Vincent Geloso

READ MORE

Stinky Stuff Happens, but How Do We Prepare?

– June 9, 2021

“The problem is that we don’t know what disasters are lurking on the horizon, and preparing for all the possible ones we can reasonably foresee is impossible and excessively costly. Even if we somehow managed to, individually or as a society, it still doesn’t guarantee protection against the truly black swans, i.e. the disasters of kinds and magnitudes that nobody could foresee.” ~ Joakim Book

READ MORE

Support for Lockdowns: A ‘Bootleggers and Baptists’ Phenomenon

– June 8, 2021

“This goes a long way toward explaining the behavior of white collar professionals during the pandemic: they have been acting out of a genuine sense of virtue, but they have also done rather well out of doing so, at least in the short term. It’s not one or the other, and high and low motives are not mutually exclusive – it’s both in combination that does the trick.” ~ David McGrogan

READ MORE

FDR Versus Liberalism: Quotations From David Green, 1987

– June 7, 2021

“In my view, one does well to climb out of Roosevelt’s trenches and rejoin the great arc of Western civilization. The more people who uphold the liberal semantic christened by Adam Smith, the better.” ~ Daniel B. Klein

READ MORE

Will Biden’s Sham Corruption Crackdown Endanger Freedom?

– June 7, 2021

“Joe Biden has never provided any evidence that he is more trustworthy on corruption than any other career Washington politician. Regardless of the plaudits that Biden receives, new federal crackdowns on cryptocurrency and “pernicious foreign influence” could roil financial markets and undercut freedom of the press.” ~ James Bovard

READ MORE

The Public Interest and the Constitutional Order

– June 6, 2021

“The public interest and other phrases like it have far too much importance in the functions of our government. In theory, the public interest and other vague objectives like it have no discrete meaning. In practice, they simply represent the ambitions and goals of those in power.” ~ Ethan Yang

READ MORE

Remembering the Tiananmen Square Massacre

– June 4, 2021

“We should be inspired by the countless activists across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the world who risk persecution every day to shine a light on the lies of the CCP. We should not only pray but work to ensure that this fateful day was not a violent snuffing of the flame of Chinese liberty, but rather the spark that would ignite the inferno of freedom that burns in the hearts of over a billion people.” ~ Ethan Yang

READ MORE

Capitalism Can’t Fix An Artificial Labor Shortage

– June 3, 2021

“Governments only have spending power and faux swagger insofar as they arrogate to themselves a rising percentage of the production created by capitalistic endeavor. In other words, capitalism is the source of congressional largesse. In 2020, Congress chose to use the wealth extracted from capitalists in order to make hiring quite a bit more expensive for capitalists.” ~ John Tamny

READ MORE

Fun Ways to Annoy China and Support Taiwan

– June 3, 2021

“China is deeply concerned with its global image and is also highly sensitive to having its narrative broken. The best ways to annoy China are ultimately to shine sunlight on its lies and to restore our confidence in ourselves as a civilization that treasures individual liberty rather than kicking ourselves down the road of self-pity and regret.” ~ Ethan Yang

READ MORE