More than 85,000 IRS employees have been laid off during the ongoing partial shutdown of the United States Federal Government, leaving only about 9% of the workforce to do all the work. Don’t start celebrating yet, apparently the IRS can still extort hundreds of millions of people with less than 10% of it’s usual staffing…...
Last night I had a terribly brief discussion about society with some family members. Within 15 minutes I was asked about energy, environment, education, foreign policy, and economics. Of course, I had answers for their questions, but these are complicated subjects when you have to deconstruct 60 years of government propaganda from a man’s mind…....
The world may now rejoice, poverty has ended, and coercion was the cure all along. You silly anarchists with your peaceful methods, ha! If that sounds ridiculous, congrats, you’re sane. But that’s the claim being made by Tim Worstall, in Forbes today, and he actually makes some interesting points. Last week the US Census released figures on…...
In a 9-1 vote, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to continue the $85 Billion/month bond buying program some have called “QE4Ever”. The move came as a surprise to more than 2/3 of economists recently polled by the Wall Street Journal who expected Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s news conference today, to include an announcement of tapering…...
People often ask how this or that function of society would work in the absence of the State. Of course, each of those questions has its own answers, but there are some underlying core ideas that can help you come to your own conclusions, and which would become rather repetitive if I outlined them every…...
Since when is violence considered intellectual? Since when does one person own the thoughts of another? Since about 400 years ago, as it turns out. I really like this subject because it was one of the last aspects of statism that I clung to before embracing the far clearer moral compass of voluntarism. If we…...
Never shying from controversy, I’ve been meaning to tear down some of the fundamental constructs of libertarianism. Or at least, point out how foolishly some people try to apply them. It was suggested to me by a reader to address this use of the term “collectivism” by libertarians, and especially after Larken Rose addressed the…...