Why do statists support higher tax rates? The most obvious answer is greed. In other words, leftists want more tax money since they personally benefit when there’s a larger burden of government spending. And the greed can take many forms. They may want bigger government because they’re welfare recipients getting handouts. They may want bigger government because […]
read more...Imagine you’re a statist and you want to raise your kids to have the same spiteful and envious mindset. What’s the best approach? Well, sending your children to a government schoolis an obvious first step. But kids sometimes rebel against big-government orthodoxy, so perhaps you want to take additional measures such as a visit to their school from President […]
read more...As part of his State-of-the-Union speech, President Obama announced he was going to unilaterally create a new retirement savings account that supposedly would be available to all workers. Employers would be mandated to facilitate these”MyRA” accounts, and the money collected would be invested in “guaranteed” government bonds. There are some good features to the MyRA plan, […]
read more...Early last year, with the sequester about to begin, President Obama stated that “these cuts are not smart, they are not fair, they will hurt our economy, they will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls.” He made this statement because Keynesian theorysays government spending can boost “aggregate demand” and goose an economy. So less government spending obviously […]
read more...The Bureaucrats at the OECD don’t pay any taxes on their own salaries, but they work very hard to make sure everyone else is hit with exorbitant rates. They’ve persistently fought against tax competition to make it easier for politicians to raise taxes without driving away taxpayers and investment. And in the OECD’s fantasy world, […]
read more...Self awareness is supposed to be a good thing, so I’m going to openly acknowledge that I have an unusual fixation on the size of government. I don’t lose a wink of sleep thinking about deficits, but I toss and turn all night fretting about the overall burden of government spending. My peculiar focus on the […]
read more...One of the many differences between advocates of freedom and supporters of statism is how they view “rights.” Libertarians, along with many conservatives, believe in the right to be left alone and not molested by government. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as “negative liberty,” which is just another way of saying “the absence […]
read more...People are getting increasingly agitated about being spied on by government. The snoops at the National Security Agency have gotten the most attention, and those bureaucrats are in the challenging position of trying to justify massive invasions of our privacy when they can’t show any evidence that this voyeurism has stopped a single terrorist attack. And let’s […]
read more...Let’s start this post with some cheerful news. The statists face a huge uphill battle if their campaign to undermine our rights to keep and bear arms. If you want evidence, just look at last year’s special election defeats of two anti-Second Amendment politicians in Colorado (followed by the resignation of another state senator who feared a recall). Or remind […]
read more...If you want to know why the left is wrong about income inequality, you need to watch this Margaret Thatcher video. In just a few minutes, the “Iron Lady” explains how some – perhaps most – statists would be willing to reduce income for the poor if they could impose even greater damage on the rich. […]
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