My Favorite Paine Quote

War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home; the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditure. In reviewing [...]

Harry Reid – “Taxation Is Not Coercive”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirms in this interview what some of us have long suspected–namely that politicians are mostly those individuals too out of touch with reality to be capable of finding employment anywhere else!

Opponents of the "Crown Jewel"

There was a time when self-reliance wasn’t such a tough sell. Today, however, the thought of dismantling Social Security strikes most as somehow un-American. It is, after all, the “cornerstone of the New Deal.” It saved the poor and elderly from indigence and provided dignity in a monthly paycheck. Legend has it that 70 years [...]

Tax Withholding: An Immodest Proposal

At the beginning of each class I teach I explain why I dislike boxing. I make the point to help my students understand what I believe is the purpose of education. Boxers have a clear-cut goal: to knock their opponents unconscious. That’s exactly opposite our goal as students. We strive to become more conscious. For [...]

The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It

The word “greedy” is so hopelessly vague that it is virtually useless. But if anyone can be said to be greedy, it’s those who run the government. For them the word is appropriate both for how much money they want and how they get it: taxation, confiscation, fiscal force. Aside from a few freelance criminals, [...]

Welcome to Canada

Monte Solberg is a member of the Canadian Parliament and chief finance critic for the Reform Party. People who are newcomers or visitors to Canada sometimes have trouble understanding how our government works so I have prepared the following short primer. Taxes are the money forcibly taken from almost every man, woman, and child in [...]

The Twenty-First Century City

Books by politicians. Seldom worth reading and rarely even worthy of the appellation “book,” they are usually tedious pastiches of campaign blather, clichés, flattering photos, and anything else designed to help enhance election prospects. Don’t waste your time. But every now and then a politician writes a book that is not a waste of time, [...]

Reviving a Civil Society

“Taxes,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “are what we pay for civilized society.” But as my fellow Freeman columnist Mark Skousen explained in his remarkable monograph “Persuasion vs. Force,” a much better case can be made that taxation is actually the price we pay for the lack of civilization. If people took better care of [...]

Another Shocking Reversal in Macroeconomics

Who wrote this? “Fiscal policy is no longer a major tool of stabilization policy in the United States. Over the foreseeable future, stabilization policy will be performed by Federal Reserve monetary policy.”

Milton Friedman? No, it was not a monetarist.

I recently met with Milton Friedman in his home in San Francisco, and asked him who he thought wrote the above statement. “Alan Greenspan?” he queried. No, it wasn’t a Federal Reserve official.