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What Do Citizens Owe Government?

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When politicians are not promising new benefits to citizens, they continually remind citizens what they owe the government. From their first years in government schools, children are indoctrinated with the notion that government provides them some grandiose benefit. This seed often produces a harvest of servility in later life. But few people stop and try to accurately calculate this supposed debt. What does the citizen owe the state? Or, more accurately, what does the citizen owe the politicians and bureaucrats who claim to represent and embody the state? Every extension of the welfare state results, directly or indirectly, in politicians and bureaucrats feeling entitled to demand more obedience from people. What does the government do for citizens that citizens could not do as well or better for themselves? This is the first question that must be answered before gauging how much obedience people might owe a government. ...

My Time in the Tower of London

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I visited the Tower of London in May on an overcast, dreary Friday afternoon. The home of so many famous executions and king-approved murders is kept in spiffy shape. The tour guide — a former British sergeant-military wearing a large “Beefeater”-style hat — regaled listeners with tales of beheadings gone wrong, drunks with axes hacking away at half-dead corpses, never quite getting a clean cut. Some of the lines of stone near the castle were remnants of the Roman conquest of England. The castle itself was begun in earnest in 1066, just after the Norman conquest of England. Within a few centuries, the castle went from being a symbol of foreign occupation to a symbol of legitimacy. By overshadowing the London landscape, the Tower put fear into the heart of anyone who considered resisting royal authority — no matter how murderous the king’s henchmen became. The tour guide pointed to Traitor’s Gate — where he said the most notorious criminals ...

Killing in the Name of Democracy

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President George W. Bush perpetually invokes the goal of spreading democracy to sanctify his foreign policy. Unfortunately, he is only the latest in a string of presidents who cloaked aggression in idealistic rhetoric. Killing in the name of democracy has a long and sordid history. The U.S. governments first experience with forcibly spreading democracy came in the wake of the Spanish-American War. When the U.S. government declared war on Spain in 1898, it pledged it would not annex foreign territory. But after a swift victory, the United States annexed all of the Philippines. As Tony Smith, author of Americas Mission, noted, Ultimately, the democratization of the Philippines came to be the principal reason the Americans were there; now the United States had a moral purpose to its ...

The No-Fault No-Fly List: Washington’s Most Irresponsible Agency Strikes Again

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The Transportation Security Administration got another black eye recently when Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) revealed that he had been blocked from flying five times because his name triggered an alarm on the feds’ No-Fly list. Kennedy’s staff had to make multiple calls to high-ranking federal officials before the attempted travel ban was lifted on the Senator-for-Life. One senior Bush ...

Foreign Dissent on Bush’s Imperial Ambitions

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The Bush administration was outraged this past summer when German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder starkly declared that he would not support Bush’s war with Iraq. The resulting transatlantic brouhaha provides insights into political developments and delusions in both the United States and Germany. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld huffed that the German campaign had been “unhelpful” and that Schroeder’s comments “had ...