Hannity and Goolsbee in the Statist Box by Jacob G. Hornberger September 7, 2012 Yesterday I happened to tune in on the radio to a fascinating and boring exchange between conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity and a liberal economist named Austan Goolsbee, who used to serve on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. The exchange was boring, for me as a libertarian, because it involved the standard solution proposed by liberals and conservatives to ...
Exceptional Brutality and Hypocrisy by Jacob G. Hornberger September 6, 2012 When Republicans talk about the exceptional nature of the U.S. government, they might well be referring to both its brutality and its hypocrisy. Such characteristics are on full display in a just-released report by Human Rights Watch, which details how the CIA during the Bush administration renditioned people to Libya for the purpose of torture. Libya? Yes, I know what ...
And Now We Have Spain by Jacob G. Hornberger September 5, 2012 American statists love to tell us how important it is that the U.S. government continue spending and borrowing ever-increasing amounts of money. They say all that spending and borrowing is the key to economic prosperity. Stimulus, they call it. By spending and borrowing, the government “stimulates” the economy, which then becomes strong and booming. That’s why statists don’t give a ...
More Foreign Aid to Egypt’s Dictatorship by Jacob G. Hornberger September 4, 2012 When the next U.S. debt ceiling comes around, one thing is for sure: the mainstream press will be shouting and crying about how important it is to lift the ceiling once again, thereby permitting the federal government to pile even more debt onto the backs of the American people. Unfortunately, in the period of time leading up to the debt ...
The Power of Ideas on Liberty by Jacob G. Hornberger August 31, 2012 Imagine if you lived in a society in which the state controlled religion in the same way that it currently controls education. Imagine that this has been going on for more than a century. Each locality is divided into church districts. Parents are required by law to send their children to a state-run church within the district in which they ...
The Immorality of Small Government by Jacob G. Hornberger August 30, 2012 One of the favorite mantras of conservatives is “We favor small government.” As the conservative Wall Street Journal put it, “Rep. Paul Ryan took the national political stage Wednesday as the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate, giving a televised speech that laid out one of the GOP’s sharpest cases yet … for Republicans as the party of small government. ...
The Republican Establishment vs. Ron Paul by Jacob G. Hornberger August 29, 2012 Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post yesterday, entitled “A Storm Inside the GOP Convention,” detailed some rather shabby treatment of Ron Paul and his delegates by Mitt Romney and the Republican establishment. Milbank writes: “The Romney campaign had taken pains to stifle the Paul rebellion, by denying him a speaking role, expediting the roll call, changing ...
Disarmed at the Empire State Building by Jacob G. Hornberger August 28, 2012 Not surprisingly, in the wake of the recent shooting in front of the Empire State Building, the gun-control crowd has surfaced again. After Jeffrey Johnson shot and killed former co-worker Steven Ercolino, gun controllers trotted out their old familiar mantra, “This shows, once again, how badly we need gun control.” What? Somebody needs to inform these people of a very basic ...
Why Romney Is Raising the Birth Certificate Issue by Jacob G. Hornberger August 27, 2012 While the Obama camp and even some in the GOP ranks are upset with Mitt Romney for bringing up the issue of President Obama’s birth certificate, the reason Romney did it might well be that it’s the only issue on which he and Obama disagree. On all the fundamental issues, with the exception of abortion, the two candidates are ...
Dictatorial War-making by Jacob G. Hornberger August 24, 2012 Notice that all the talk about whether the U.S. government should attack Iran and Syria focuses on whether President Obama will order his army to attack these two countries or on whether he should do so. The process has become so natural and normal that it’s easy to forget the dictatorial nature of the power that the president now ...
Statist Fallacies on Federal Taxes, Spending, and Debt by Jacob G. Hornberger August 23, 2012 A piece in today’s New York Times shows why, under the statist paradigm in which we live, it is so difficult for America to extricate itself from the federal government’s over-spending and over-borrowing. The article, “Beware the Fiscal Cliff” by David Firestone, suggests that there’s really no good answer to the government’s fiscal woes because drastically cutting spending ...
Is Libertarianism Extreme? by Jacob G. Hornberger August 22, 2012 Statists oftentimes accuse libertarians of holding extreme views. One reason for that is that since we have all been born and raised in a society based on welfare and warfare, the libertarian philosophy, which stands in opposition to socialism, interventionism, and imperialism, seems extreme to statists. Consider, for example, the right to keep one’s own money and decide what to ...
