Incompressible

Here is a short, slick  video  presentation of the original Liberalism®.

Let's say gun control advocates are right: guns kill people and more guns means more people getting killed. After all, this is not completely unreasonable, guns do kill things (including people) and we might surmise that the more there are, the more people will get killed. But let's assume the evidence is on the gun-control side of the debate. Does it then follow that we should trust the government to control guns? Enter critical thinking. The part of critical thinking that I did not learn in school, college, from family or friends is that of incorporating motive into understanding the things that other people say. Henry Hazlitt says in the opening paragraph of his famous book  Economics in One Lesson ,  "The inherent difficulties of [economics] would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain econom...

There are many tax-avoidance/protest/evasion/honesty/whatever-you-want-to-call-it movements out there. Most of them argue that there is some legal loophole to the payment of taxes and Americans are not really  required  to pay taxes, by law. The whole thing is a scam, they claim, and you are being duped into paying your taxes when all you need to do is just not pay them and not be intimidated by the investigations, threats of prosecution, etc. Of course, any person with half their wits about them knows that there is no mistake, there is a de facto and de jure requirement by the government to pay taxes. But this whole argument opens up, in my opinion, a far more interesting question: why do we have to pay taxes  at all ? So what if there's no legal loophole? By what right does the government require me to pay them? There are four possibilities, all of which present glaring ethical problems: 1) Might makes right. The government can make me pay, therefore, I have to pay. 2) Legislativ...

Becky Akers  documents  the life of a promising young man, Tim Masters, destroyed by agents of the state - for ego's sake. I challenge you to read the article from beginning to end, and check her links to background materials. When you finish, if you do not believe that the government is evil, I want to understand how you come to this conclusion. Is it because you believe we need to break a few eggs in order to make the omelet? What is it that you think justifies empowering a special class of men - "employees of the state" - to make false accusations and imprison a man, without any evidence against him, for two decades? Of course, I'm sure the apologists for the state will be quick to point to the twelve jurors. But it is becoming more and more clear that 12 jurors are no longer sufficient protection from the wiles of the state. Our prisons are swollen with people convicted of non-crimes and many wrongfully convicted innocents. 1 in 100 Americans are in jail or prison...

Here is a neat  article  on something I've been thinking about lately. Very old, famous, scarce and/or reputed wines can fetch staggering prices per bottle, in the 10's of thousands. Many of these wines attain their lofty prices by careful storage and studious refusal of their present owners to consume them over a period of many decades. Prices, in the wine market, serve the function of  rationing . By virtue of the higher future prices expected on certain wines, potential consumers and investors bid up the present price and squeeze out the more causal consumers who cannot or will not spend the requisite amount of money on such high-priced wines. The net result is that those who desire to consume such old or scarce wines are able to - with a hefty price tag. Let us choose some other means of rationing wine consumption. We could issue coupons, or allocate certain bottles to be released for consumption at some future time, or we could establish first-come-first-serve queues or an...

Do you know what the Federal Reserve is? Are you sure? Please watch this  informative interview  of G. Edward Griffin discussing his book,  The Creature from Jekyll Island . He explains, in plain, simple English, what the Federal Reserve is - a quasi-private banking cartel - how it came into being under the shroud of absolute secrecy, what its function is, how government and bankers benefit from the system and the consequences to the American public of its existence. When you understand these basic facts about this troubling institution, I believe you will see that this is  the  issue of our time. The US government in cooperation with the private banks of the Federal Reserve have been devaluing the US dollar at an exponential pace that cannot be indefinitely sustained - sooner or later, the system will collapse. What will replace the dollar once the Federal Reserve has destroyed it? World Bank notes? What checks and balances would there be on such a money existing outside the limitatio...