Freedom lives at UT Austin
With the 2012 election around the corner, Ron Paul and his supporters won’t go down without a fight no matter how much the mainstream media attempts to black them out from the news. If you had been at the LBJ Lawn at 7PM you would have witnessed that his campaign has a youthful following. The [...]
Just when you thought you could not feel any safer, the Houston METRO system has teamed up with the TSA. Under the program launched last week, passengers on busses run by the Houston METRO system will be subjected to random questioning and searches from “counter-terrorism experts” hired by the Transportation Security Administration. Yes, the very [...]
Over the past couple months on the Libertarian Longhorns Facebook group, I have had the pleasure of creating liberty-themed “memes” that have generally proven to be popular. The Internet is by far one of the greatest examples of spontaneous order I can think of, and the culture it has created is incredibly unique. Through internet [...]
In mid-October, the Libertarian Longhorns hosted the third annual Students for Liberty Austin Conference. I had the opportunity to speak at the conference in the student panel about activism, involvement, and my experiences in the liberty movement. While I felt I rambled a bit at times, I’ve been told by a number of people that [...]
Rent-seeking refers to the behavior of individuals or groups expending resources to achieve public policy decisions that transfer wealth to them at the expense of others. Some examples:
A nonprofit organization might seek for the government to spend taxpayer money on their pet cause, such as protecting the environment or researching a disease.
A workers’ union might want the government to force employers to provide higher wages, more benefits and greater job security.
A corporation might seek subsidization to support an unsustainable business model instead of working to become more profitable.
While the rent-seekers should be faulted for the behavior, it is the government granting rent-seekers what they want that is the real problem. As it shells out more benefits and privileges, government has to collect more taxes to administer and pay for them, thus vastly increasing its size and scope.
Thanks in large part to misinformation, protectionist legislation passed with the support of Big Labor and other rent-seeking groups, and rhetoric accompanying these actions, immigration has become a divisive topic. As was seen between East and West Berlin decades ago and between the United States and Mexico today, this controversy sometimes results in the construction of physical barriers to prevent the free movement of individuals. Yet, fortunately there are some reasonable voices in this discussion, helping to point out how immigration restrictions further entrench governments and negate individual rights, in addition to severely hampering the economy.
Thanks in large part to the work of the Institute for Justice and the 2005 Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London, eminent domain (the taking of private property by the government) has caused much grassroots and legal activity.
First, let’s get clear on what kind of censorship we oppose. We oppose any censorship by government, because only the government has the “authority” to legally use force against you for expressing your ideas. Your neighbor might kick you off his property if you say something he dislikes, or a privately owned newspaper can refuse to publish your letter to the editor, but neither should legally use force against you to shut you up.
Freedom subsumes individual liberty and personal responsibility. If individuals are free to act and also held responsible to bear the consequences for their actions, good outcomes will be reinforce correct behavior and bad outcomes will provide a learning experience. When government gets in the way of this feedback loop, it prevents the development of virtue and merely subjects the individual to the will of the State.
