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 ...
Bogus Justifications for the National-Security State by Jacob G. Hornberger August 21, 2012 Interventionists justify the existence of the vast military and intelligence establishment in America by telling us that there are “radical Islamic elements” in the world. But the question is: Should that be a justification for continuing the U.S. national security state — i.e., a permanent military and intelligence establishment — that was brought into existence in 1947? After all, what was ...
A Frankenation in Iraq by Jacob G. Hornberger August 20, 2012 I wonder how many U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq, or have who lost arms or legs or mental stability from their invasion or occupation of the country, figured that the reason they were making such an enormous sacrifice was so that Iraq could ultimately get to the point where it would be helping Iran secretly avoid the economic ...
The Solution to Poverty by Jacob G. Hornberger August 17, 2012 Ever since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, liberals have maintained that the way to alleviate poverty is to have government wage war on poverty. What does that mean? It means two things. First, it means having the government use its power to take money from “the rich” and redistribute it to the poor (after deducting the costs of government to perform this ...
Immigrants, the Scapegoats by Jacob G. Hornberger August 16, 2012 Guess who the Greek government and Greek citizenry are blaming for their economic woes. Immigrants — the people who also serve as a favorite scapegoat for many Americans who, like the Greeks, are lamenting the ever-mounting crisis of the welfare-state, interventionist way of life. According to an August 6, 2012, article in the New York Times, Greek officials ...
