What Have You Done for Liberty Today?

There are two basic prisms through which we can see, study, and prescribe for human society: individualism and collectivism. These worldviews are as different as night and day, and they create a great divide in the social sciences. 

When we expect the government to substitute for what we ourselves ought to do, we expect the impossible and we end up with the intolerable. 

Statism isn’t voluntary, which by definition means it’s violent. Either we interact with others in peace and mutual respect, or we boss them around as nanny states always do. 

Reading The Jungle and assuming it’s a credible news source is like watching The Blair Witch Project because you think it’s a documentary. 

In American history, 1913 should go down as a year that will live in infamy. But it wasn’t the Japanese who bombed us that year. It was our own duly elected officials.

Why is it that you statists never seem to learn anything about government? You see almost any shortcoming in the marketplace as a reason for government to get bigger, but you rarely see any shortcoming in government as a reason for it to get smaller.

Socialism keeps promising omelets, but all we get are broken eggs.

Private coinage was banned not because it didn’t work, but because it did. Governments just don’t care much for competition or for sound and honest money.

I don’t much care what you call yourself, but if you want to see a hefty reduction in the initiation of force in society, then you’re an ally I want to collaborate with.

Child labor was relieved of its worst attributes not by legislative fiat but by the progressive march of an ever more productive capitalist system. 

Character is ultimately more important than all the college degrees, public offices, or even all the knowledge that one might accumulate in a lifetime.

History texts often bestow great credit on the men of the Second Continental Congress for winning American independence. A case can also be made, however, that we won it in spite of them.

When real love is the motivator, people deal with each other peacefully. We use force only in self-defense. We respect each other’s rights and differences. Tolerance and cooperation govern our interactions.

I wonder if America has become a giant nursery, full of screaming babies who see the state as their loving nanny. It makes me want to scream, “Grow up!”

What a poverty program liberty proved to be! In spite of a horrendous civil war, half a dozen economic downturns and wave after wave of impoverished immigrants, America progressed from near-universal poverty at the start of the century to within reach of the world's highest per-capita income at the end of the century. The poverty that remained stood out like the proverbial sore thumb because it was now the exception, no longer the rule.

A pure democracy is unwieldy and unworkable, endlessly contentious, and disrespectful of certain inalienable rights of individuals who may find themselves in the minority.

Considering the privatization option, whether or not the final decision is to actually do it, is nothing less than good stewardship of the public purse. Thinking seriously about it prompts officials to open their minds and think about government services in ways they never pondered before. It forces them to find out, for instance, how much it is actually costing them to provide those services.

What happened in France in the Summer 2003 heat wave should be laid at least partly at the doorstep of the French welfare state and its social consequences.