In the movie The Fifth Element, protagonist Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg perfectly explains The Broken Window Fallacy (see below), first described by Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen). Zorg demonstrates how tyrants use this misunderstanding to justify all types [...]
Category Archives: Features
Another OWS Misfire
A recent YouTube video (below) suggests that Occupy Wall Street protesters can take their grievances to the banks directly by resurrecting the old idea of sending back the postage paid envelopes in credit card solicitations with political messages enclosed along with stuff to make the postage more expensive — like wood shims or roofing shingles. Sounds like a [...]
Wealth Destruction — By Any Means Necessary
Governments destroy wealth. It’s what they do. This is why it is always mildly amusing (and sad) to watch people protest for the reduction or elimination of “Waste, Fraud and Abuse.” These three things are a permanent feature of government. They will grow or shrink in direct proportion to the size of government. The people [...]
The Very Best Form of Socialism
All Peoples — regardless of race or heritage — who desire a permanent state of freedom should study the history of slavery. Slavery is, of course, the natural inclination of the State. The State will constantly contrive a way to create slavery. Since it is not currently possible for the State to do this overtly, they will [...]
If Only They Knew They Were Slaves
Harriet Tubman was the Morpheus of the 1800′s. What she offered was unique — freedom for those who wanted it. But many people don’t want it, or perhaps they think they want it, but they are unable to identify what it is, or what is keeping them from being free. (Indeed, this is the main [...]
Cognitive Dissonance
The “Occupy” franchise might have some demands — or they might not — they don’t really know yet. They sometimes identify the problem, but then their solutions are always more of the same. Because of this failure (refusal?) to link cause and effect, they become Cognitive Dissonance incarnate. They are Anarchists for Big Government. They see Crony [...]
No “Talented” Bureaucrats
Former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has said: “The country’s political polarization was growing worse — harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing.” He wishes out loud that enlightened bureaucrats would not be overly constrained by lesser souls who hinder their work, presumably because they are too dense to comprehend the good that bureaucrats are [...]
Our Lost History
Part of the problem with the school system that exists today — having been completely and decisively overtaken by the State — is that the history of freedom has been forgotten. Some burning embers still remain — the names and characters are still mostly recognizable (although this is becoming less true all the time), but their connection [...]
Resigned to Failure
It is a well known fact of basic economics that third party payer systems in any market result in price escalations (coupled with increased consumption). As the country lunges further into a third party payer system, medical policy “experts” are banging their heads against the wall trying to control costs, even after enthusiastically destroying the very checks and balances [...]
Patients Are Not the Customers
From The Daily Mail Online: The British National Health Service has adopted sashes to instruct patients not to talk to nurses during drug distribution. They are claiming that it reduces medical errors, but it is actually a very revealing sort of rationing of the nurses time. Nothing I’ve ever seen more clearly states how low on the [...]
