Liberty Search is a Google custom search engine that I developed. It searches sites friendly to liberty, capitalism, and free markets, such as mises.org, cato.org, and many others.
Or, visit the page at Google for Liberty Search. This page has more information about this Google custom search engine.
Barbra Streisand told Diane Sawyer that we’re in a global warming crisis, and we can expect more and more intense storms, droughts and dust bowls. But before they act, weather experts say they’re still waiting to hear from Celine Dion.
— Jay Leno
The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.
— Milton Friedman
It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.
— Albert Shanker, former President of the American Federation of Teachers [1989]
It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
— Fredrich August von Hayek
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
— G. Gordon Liddy
Increasingly, it seems that the biggest difference between conservatives and “liberals” is that the conservatives know government is force. But that doesn’t stop them from using it.
— John Stossel
One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.
— P.J. O’Rourke
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as “caring” and “sensitive” because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money. Well, who isn’t? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he’ll do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head.
— P.J. O’Rourke
For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto by Murray N. Rothbard
An absolutely awesome book. If you are interested in liberty, this is, in my opinion, the most important book to read.
I think Lew Rockwell, who I recently had the pleasure to meet at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, says it best about this book:
Once you are exposed to the complete picture — and For a New Liberty has been the leading means of exposure for more than a quarter of a century — you cannot forget it. It becomes the indispensable lens through which we can see events in the real world with the greatest possible clarity. … Its logical and moral consistency, together with its empirical explanatory muscle, represents a threat to any intellectual vision that sets out to use the state to refashion the world according to some pre-programmed plan. And to the same extent it impresses the reader with a hopeful vision of what might be. … He never talks down to his readers but always with clarity. Rothbard speaks for himself. … The reader will discover on his or her own that every page exudes energy and passion, that the logic of his argument is impossibly compelling, and that the intellectual fire that inspired this work burns as bright now as it did all those years ago.
And finally, from Lew again:
The book is still regarded as “dangerous” precisely because, once the exposure to Rothbardianism takes place, no other book on politics, economics, or sociology can be read the same way again. What was once a commercial phenomenon has truly become a classical statement that I predict will be read for generations to come.
This book is available for purchase at the Mises Institute at http://mises.org. It may be read in its entirety from that site, and an audio recording is available there as well.
As humans, we have the right to gamble, as it is an activity that people may voluntarily take part in, and it causes no harm or violence to others.
As such, we have to wonder why most forms of gambling have been illegal in Kansas for so long.
More importantly, what has changed this year that would cause the state to allow us to gamble in casinos? What has happened that would cause this activity, formerly considered a vice by the state, to be allowed and even desired?
The answer is simple: the anticipation of millions of dollars in new revenue for the state to spend. It is for that reason that the legislature and governor are willing to let the people gamble in casinos.
They changed their mind cheaply, too. The amount of revenue it is estimated casinos would bring to the state is barely more than one percent of the state’s total spending. Subtract from that the extra spending that even casino supporters concede the state will need to fix the problems some gamblers will cause.
It’s sad to realize the legislature and governor can be bought so cheaply.
We as humans have the inherent right to gamble. The legislature should not have to pass a law allowing this right, we should not have to gain a majority vote in order to exercise this right, we should not have to suffer huge expansion of government regulation to tell us where and when and on how many of what type of machines we can exercise this right, and we shouldn’t have to pay the state a huge chunk of casino revenue in order to exercise this right.
That’s what is perverse about gambling law in Kansas.
Here’s the one law concerning gambling in Wichita and Kansas that I would vote for: “All laws prohibiting and regulating gambling in Kansas are hereby repealed.”
That’s the only law consistent with personal freedom and liberty.
The law that has been passed, however, provides more power for the state and more opportunities to regulate our lives.
Even casino supporters concede large social costs will accompany a casino. As we have government that stands willing to pay these costs, the taxpayer will suffer these costs.
In the balance, the expansion of state bureaucracy, tax collection, and regulation, plus the social costs that the state believes it must shoulder; these considerations outweigh our freedom to gamble.
The ending of For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, by Murray N. Rothbard:
Toward a Free America
The libertarian creed, finally, offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Even more than conservatives, who are often attached to the monarchical traditions of a happily obsolete European past, libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy. Libertarians are the only genuine current heirs of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson, and the abolitionists.
And yet, while we are more truly traditional and more rootedly American than the conservatives, we are in some ways more radical than the radicals. Not in the sense that we have either the desire or the hope of remoulding human nature by the path of politics; but in the sense that only we provide the really sharp and genuine break with the encroaching statism of the twentieth century. The Old Left wants only more of what we are suffering from now; the New Left, in the last analysis, proposes only still more aggravated statism or compulsory egalitarianism and uniformity. Libertarianism is the logical culmination of the now forgotten “Old Right” (of the 1930s and ‘40s) opposition to the New Deal, war, centralization, and State intervention. Only we wish to break with all aspects of the liberal State: with its welfare and its warfare, its monopoly privileges and its egalitarianism, its repression of victimless crimes whether personal or economic. Only we offer technology without technocracy, growth without pollution, liberty without chaos, law without tyranny, the defense of property rights in one’s person and in one’s material possessions.
Strands and remnants of libertarian doctrines are, indeed, all around us, in large parts of our glorious past and in values and ideas in the confused present. But only libertarianism takes these strands and remnants and integrates them into a mighty, logical, and consistent system. The enormous success of Karl Marx and Marxism has been due not to the validity of his ideas — all of which, indeed, are fallacious — but to the fact that he dared to weave socialist theory into a mighty system. Liberty cannot succeed without an equivalent and contrasting systematic theory; and until the last few years, despite our great heritage of economic and political thought and practice, we have not had a fully integrated and consistent theory of liberty. We now have that systematic theory; we come, fully armed with our knowledge, prepared to bring our message and to capture the imagination of all groups and strands in the population. All other theories and systems have clearly failed: socialism is in retreat everywhere, and notably in Eastern Europe; liberalism has bogged us down in a host of insoluble problems; conservatism has nothing to offer but sterile defense of the status quo. Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind.
The opening words of Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman, written around 1962:
In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your country” implies that the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.
The Miracle and Morality of the Market
Richard M. Ebeling
Click here to read the article.
In this short article we learn the simple mechanism that makes our economy work so well. Interfering with that mechanism is not only harmful, it is immoral.
Prices convey the information that we need to make our economy work. Here is why:
How are the activities of an increasingly larger group of individuals successfully coordinated, so that all the multitudes of demands and supplies are brought into balance and harmony? The Austrian economist and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek showed how all of the knowledge and information in society can be encapsulated in the price system of the free-market economy. In our roles as both consumers and producers we communicate to one another what we think goods, resources, capital, and labor services are worth to us in their various and competing uses through the prices we are willing to pay for them. These “price signals” serve as the means for all of us to decide and coordinate what we want and are willing to do together with other members of society.
Because of the information conveyed by prices, is not necessary for a government to rule over the economy to cause it to function properly. In fact, government intervention in the economy is harmful, because the market is so complex that it is impossible to guide effectively. Central planning of economic activity will make people poorer, not wealthier. As Thomas Sowell relates: “The last premiere of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is said to have asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: How do you see to it that people get food? The answer was that she didn’t. Prices did that. And the British people were better fed than those in the Soviet Union, even though the British have never grown enough food to feed themselves in more than a century. Prices bring them food from other countries.”
The moral dimension of the market refers to how in a free society, people enter into transactions freely, choosing those that they believe will benefit them:
There are none who are only masters and others who are simply servants. In the market society we are all both servants and masters, but without either force or its threat. In our roles as producers — be it as men who hire out our labor for wages, resource owners who rent out or sell our property for a price, or entrepreneurs who direct production for anticipated profits — we serve our fellow men in attempting to make the products and provide the services we think they may be willing and interested in buying from us.
Yet we know there are those who wish to interfere with the working of a free market through various means. All attempts to do this reduce the amount of liberty we are able to experience.
Too many want to dictate how others may make a living, or at what price and under what terms they may peacefully and voluntarily interact with their fellow human beings for purposes of mutual material, cultural, and spiritual betterment.
Often the concept of free markets is viewed as contrary to a moral society. Those who advocate government programs to make us better off are portrayed as noble, virtuous, and smarter than the rest of us. This article shows us that they are not that at all — they are immoral. Why? Almost all these programs forcibly take money from one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong. There is no moral right for anyone or any government to do that, no matter how noble the cause appears.
Did you know that a study used to promote the economic development benefits of gambling in Wichita has casino workers paying for a large part of the social costs of gambling?
There is a document titled “Economic & Social Impact Anlaysis [sic] For A Proposed Casino & Hotel” created by GVA Marquette Advisors for the Wichita Downtown Development Corporation and the Greater Wichita Convention and Visitors Bureau, dated April 2004. One presentation concludes that the average cost per pathological gambler is $13,586 per year. Quoting from the study in the section titled Social Impact VII-9:
Most studies conclude that nationally between 1.0 and 1.5 percent of adults are susceptible to becoming a pathological gambler. Applying this statistic to the 521,000 adults projected to live within 50 miles of Wichita in 2008, the community could eventually have between 5,200 and 7,800 pathological gamblers. At a cost of $13,586 in social costs for each, the annual burden on the community could range between $71 and $106 million.
If all we had to do was to pay that amount each year in money that would be one thing. But the components of the cost of pathological gamblers include, according to the same study, increased crime and family costs. That is, people are hurt, physically and emotionally, by pathological gamblers. Often the people harmed are those such as children who have no option to leave the gambler.
But this study makes the argument that the economic benefits of gambling will more than pay for this social misery: “While this community social burden could be significant, its quantified estimate is still surpassed by the positive economic impacts measured in this study.”
How does the report make this conclusion? The largest components of the positive economic impacts are employee wages ($37 million), additional earnings in the county, and state casino revenue share, along with some minor elements. Together these total $142 million, which is, as the authors point out, larger than the projected costs shown above.
But this analysis is flawed. Casino employee wages can’t be used to offset the social costs of pathological gamblers, as these employees probably want to spend their wages on other things!
Economic impact studies like this often assume that any economic activity the proposed development might create is due solely to its existence, and that these monies can be used to pay for whatever problems or costs the development causes.
Just ask the prospective casino employees where they want their wages to go: into their own pockets, or be used, as this study uses them, to pay for the social costs of gambling.