Freedom lives at UT Austin
Yesterday, the world was given a treat. Bloomberg TV pit the Nobel-prize winning establishment shill Paul Krugman against the intellectual heavyweight and presidential candidate Ron Paul. Half of the debate was painful to watch; I assume I don’t need to say which half. Highlights included: Paul Krugman being completely unable to understand that while he [...]
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 [...]
Far from being environments conducive to learning, schools across the world coerce students to conform to the whims of politicians and bureaucrats. Billed as bastions of free expression, intellectual honesty and rigor, administrators have turned schools into prisons for the mind, where one-size- fits-all policies are forced upon youth and where independent thoughts are discarded. It’s a world in which the government will tell a student what they can and can’t think, wear, say, or do. It’s a world that crushes the individual for the benefit of those in power — a practice we’ve dubbed “Teensploitation.”
This article is #19 of a weekly series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by my friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct [...]
Statists are anti-progress. Statists claim their policies are for the common good. For some this claim is just a front to get more power, but for others it is a genuine goal. Nevertheless, even the most well-intentioned statists, who believe that granting government the power to control individual actions will result in a better outcome, violate rights and cause harm.
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.
This article is #15 of a weekly series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by my friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct [...]
“Progress” is an abused word these days, especially by bureaucrats and the special interest groups that cater to them. Yet such groups, in the name of progress and social justice, support government intervention through intervention in the market, minimum or living wages, and universal healthcare. We find neither progress nor justice in government actions that advance one group at the expense of another.
