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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Government

The weight of big government ultimately becomes so unbearable that even the most battle-hardened warriors come to fear it over death itself.  As Pvt. David Kenyon Webster described his time in the U. S. Army during World War II, they are “more afraid of defying the authority of an officer, backed up by the whole Army and a court-martial composed of officers like him, than we are of death by shell fire.”  He continued: “Discipline is fear, not leadership, and we are afraid — not of [the officer] but of the irresistible force that he represents. Afraid for our lives, we are more afraid of the system that holds us in thrall, and so we lie here and wait to be killed, because an officer tells us to lie here.”  This is the state of the soldier “in thrall” as it is the state of things under the weight of any massive bureaucracy or tyranny of any kind.
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Failure by Design

In the case for liberty, there is certainly some tolerance for error or failure, as it is generally suffered by the individual and not brought upon anyone by design . Wherever anyone seeks to empower government, however, one must be reasonably certain of the designs, the logic and the costs, and he must be equally honest about the unknowns as with the foreseeable consequences; after all, there is no margin for error where those designs are administered by the barrel of a gun.  One must necessarily remember that government is a monopoly on force and coercion, that force and coercion serve together as the modifying distinction between government and enterprise. It is a kind of force and coercion not by spirit or intention of written law but in accordance with the letter and understanding of the enforcers in their own time, in their own limited judgment and impaired conscience. As opposed to a state of liberty, where mistakes, failures and crimes are unavoidable in the face of human falli

Illusion, Dishonesty and Deception: The Business of Government

There is much confusion around the relationship between rising prices and employment, and this is only exacerbated by the rhetoricians in government and elsewhere. This is the confused notion that rising prices and the labor market carry a positive relationship, that rising prices are generally positively correlated with lower unemployment. In economics, there is a drawn correlation between inflation and employment, illustrated by what is known as the Phillips curve. The graphic is used to argue that employment and inflation are positively correlated. The failure of this interpretation, however, is that the lower unemployment figures fail to capture the real improvement of the marginal productivity of labor and the overall standard of living enjoyed by those economic agents. It is the responsibility of any shrewd surveyor to distill all of the available data in order to determine the true qualitative relationship between those sets and what they actually mean. This is where the quality

Celebrate 1776 for $17.76

Two hundred and forty-eight years ago, our American forefathers put forth a new proposition about the inalienable rights of man, not only asserting this proposition but mutually staking their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in its defense; among them the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, together principles enshrined within that civilization wholly committed to the endurance of liberty and limited government, that civilization preserving the memory, the history and the heritage of their forefathers and their causes.  There is no better occasion than this, and no better spirit than that of '76, to place your order for $17.76 . We are nothing without our heritage, and we are thus empty without the means to sustain it; and the ideas that survive are the ones destined to defined the kind of future to be had. Buy your copy of  Death by Socialism  today at  Lulu ,  Amazon ,  Barnes & Noble , or  Walmart . 

Artificial Intelligence

There will inevitably come a time, in the not-too-distant future, when the majority of people are likely to embrace artificial technology like ChatGPT as the gospel. They will be either unwilling or incapable as far as scrutinizing its responses Just as ChatGPT doesn’t know who specifically provides its inputs, just as it doesn’t know the extent of the credibility of those inputs, and just as it will never possess the skills of nuanced thinking, people will be hampered by the same limitations while being encouraged or predisposed to relying on its judgments. It’s unavoidable.   Authority figures have predisposed artificial technology like ChatGPT and will continue to predispose it through those inputs. They will continue to leverage it as a means to persuade and predispose people, as it is itself completely incapable of discretion and original thought.  People will rely on it to inform them of not only the laws of physics but the laws and measures written and enforced. Its fallibility

Community

In his 2011 work Economic Facts and Fallacies , the economist Thomas Sowell writes of an essential condition for property rights, that "existing residents and potential newcomers [must be permitted to] compete for the same space on an equal basis in the marketplace, rather than in a political process in which only the existing residents can vote." Sowell continues: "While the existing residents may choose to believe that they have a right to 'protect' their community against outsiders by using the power of government, the Constitution of the United States requires 'equal protection of the laws' to everyone, regardless of where they happen to live or how long they have lived there." Finally, Sowell asserts that "what existing residents choose to call 'our community' is in fact not their community... [e]ach resident [owning only] the private property which that particular resident has paid for."  As may seem uncharacteristic of this

Rally for Route 66!

Keep up the fight for the Mother Road! Rally for Route 66! There is a lot at stake in preserving this irreplaceable monument to American history, not merely as a tourist attraction but as a means to permitting a glimpse into our past, as a means to virtual time-travel into a time and space otherwise inaccessible, as a means to capturing the imaginations of future generations and to preserving the memory of our forbears in both form and spirit.  We are nothing without reverence for our forbears, without our heritage or our identity as a people, without the preserved memory of our history. Without these reminders, without the tangible connections to our past and the efforts which have forged our path and come to define us, without these monuments to the pioneering and the innovative, we are destined to forget all of that which makes us uniquely human, all of that which has afforded us so much insight and abundance, all of that which has given us pause to reflect and remember and to appre