Tag: monopoly
This series at Thoughts on Liberty shows just how poorly understood left-libertarianism is, even among those who would claim to know enough about it to laud it as ”the future of libertarianism.” Rachel Burger begins her “defense” of left-libertarianism by conflating it with liberaltarianism. Left-libertarianism is a body of outlooks within libertarianism which see leftist concerns…
The old “53% vs. 47%” meme that got so much attention in the 2012 election resurfaced this week when it came out that Colorado gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez apparently first coined it at a 2010 Rotary Club speech. The 47% who pay no income tax, he said back then, are “dependent on the largesse of…
The widely noted transition from the “old economy,” based in the production of physical commodities, to the “new economy” of the information age—with its capital base concentrated not in heavy machinery and land, but in human beings and in knowledge—has been attended by a concomitant sea change in the legal framework surrounding business. Where ingress…
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy,” one is left scratching one’s head. How refreshing it is, then, to hear a prominent establishment economist — a Nobel laureate yet — tell it straight: The managerial state…
C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The Libertarian and Catholic Social Teachings” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Free markets don’t have to mean the particular incarnation of corporate world dominance we see all around us today. For an entire tradition, an individualist anarchism that once blossomed in the United States, free…
Quella fazione del centrosinistra che va in estasi davanti a Elizabeth Warren ama citare la frase di Barney Frank, “stato è il nome che diamo a ciò che decidiamo di fare assieme”. Ora, l’idea secondo cui il governo è la personificazione di ciò che “noi” decidiamo di fare presuppone qualche correlazione significativa tra ciò che…
As far as it went, the Supreme Court generally got it right in the Hobby Lobby-Obamacare-contraception case. Unfortunately it didn’t go nearly far enough. The court ruled that “closely held corporations” whose owners have religious convictions against contraceptives cannot be forced to pay for employee coverage for those products. I wish the court could have…
The Supreme Court recently closed its term with a ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, concerning the government’s mandate for employer provided insurance to cover contraception. Voting 5-4 that closely held corporations could be exempt from the mandate if it violates the sincerely held religious beliefs of the owners, the decision has generated a lot…
(Inspired by a comment from James Tuttle) SCOTUS has been dancing its way down a “whatever it takes to keep things from collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions” tightrope with ACA. First they affirmed its dubious constitutionality, now they’re carving out exceptions for entities which claim to be acting on orders of a…
When the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision came out Monday, I had a lot of negative feelings about it, and I’ve been mulling column ideas in my head ever since. But all my attempts to organize my thoughts into a coherent statement and put them in writing — including this one — have been less…
Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again by Rich Lowry (HarperCollins 2013), 390 pages. One of the central themes in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is the ideology he calls “authoritarian high modernism”: It is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound)…
I’m neither a Christian, nor religious in any of the other ways that one might be. I find contraception, abortion and all kinds of sexual activities between consenting adults to be completely unobjectionable and well within the rights of any individual who chooses one or all of these things. Nevertheless, as a free market anarchist…
Although the recent court decision striking down tenure for public school teachers has been viewed from many angles on op-ed pages, as Mark Palko points out in the Washington Post (Vergara vs. California: Are the top 0.1% buying their version of education reform?” June 23), almost nobody’s paying attention to the fact that virtually the whole…
If you want a glimpse into the US bipartisan foreign policy establishment’s Heart of Darkness, you need look no further than Robert Kagan. He, along with his father and brother, was a signatory of the Project for a New American Century’s manifesto “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” — something normally associated with the neoconservative circles around George…
The segment of the center-left who swoon over Elizabeth Warren are fond of quoting Barney Frank’s statement that “government is the name for the things we decide to do together.” Now, the idea that government is the embodiment of things “we” decide to do presupposes some non-trivial correlation between public desires and what government actually…
Recent studies estimate that the federal regulatory burden has impaired the United States economy to the tune of almost $40 trillion, “act[ing] as a hidden tax on individuals.” Precluding new competitors and entrepreneurship, new regulations often favor established firms at the expense of both consumers and economic growth generally. What’s more, left-wing revisionists such as Gabriel…
Having netted a half-billion dollars and counting for Disney, Maleficent is the latest proof of just how lucrative successively building upon established properties can be in today’s economy. The film benefited from being uniquely able to draw on all the elements of Disney’s perennially popular animated feature version of Sleeping Beauty, which in turn overtly incorporated both the melodies…
There was a recent Facebook debate and furor over the ethics of cop killing. It was sparked, at least in part, by my stating that killing cops was still murder in a status update. The topic deserves further exploration. Killing cops is acceptable in self-defense. If a police officer commits an act of aggressive violence…
Se seguite le notizie, sentite parlare solitamente di trattati – Uruguay Round del Gatt, Nafta, Cafta, Tpp – descritti come “Accordi di Libero Scambio” che hanno l’obiettivo di “ridurre le barriere commerciali”. È una bugia. Senza alcuna eccezione, questi accordi in realtà rafforzano quella forma di protezionismo che più di ogni altra è vitale per…
Barney Frank’s statement, “Government is simply a word for the things we decide to do together,” is getting a lot of recirculation lately in goo-goo circles desperate for a glib answer to those who view government as a threat. Anyone who says a damfool thing like this and seriously means it is a gullible idiot…
