By Jacob G. Hornberger
While Democratic Party presidential candidates are stumbling over themselves in offering people free college tuition and other political candy in the hope of buying their votes, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s end all state support of colleges and universities entirely. State support of colleges and universities is part of the mandatory-charity system that we call the welfare state, a system that is supported by both Democrats and Republicans. It is a system in which the state forces people to be good, caring, and responsible by forcibly taking their money from them and giving it to others. In the case of higher education, the state taxes people and then doles out the money to colleges and universities, which the state then uses to control their activities. Where is the morality involved in a system based on mandatory charity? Where is the care, compassion, and responsibility in such a system? How can a system that is based on mandatory charity be reconciled with the principles of a free society? In a genuinely free society, a person has the right to keep his own money and decide what to do with it. A university has the right to ask people to donate to the school. Freedom entails the right of a person to say either yes or no to the university. Suppose John says, “No, I do not wish to support your school and, therefore, I choose not to make a donation.” Suppose that an agent of the school pulls out a gun and forces John to go with him to an ATM, withdraw $10,000, and hand it over to the school. Would we say that John has displayed care, compassion, and responsibility toward the school? Would we say that the school has behaved honorably and morally? Would we say that this is an example of how a free society operates? Of course not. No one in his right mind would say such things. The school is engaged in armed robbery. It deserves to be condemned and prosecuted, not honored and praised. Now, suppose the school heads to the state legislature and says, “John is an evil, greedy man who doesn’t understand the value of education. He needs to be compelled to be good, caring, and responsible. Please enact a tax, through majority vote, that takes $10,000 from John and gives it to us.” Is there any difference in principle between those two scenarios? Of course not. In one instance, it’s the school doing the robbing to feather its nest, while in the other instance it’s the state doing the robbing to feather the school’s nest. One might say, “But Jacob, it was done by majority vote. Doesn’t that change things?” Of course it doesn’t. An immoral act — the forcible taking of John’s money to feather the nest of the school — cannot be converted into a moral act simply by having a majority of elected representatives do the robbing and the handing out of the loot. Equally important is the concept of natural, God-given rights, something that America’s Declaration of Independence points out. Liberty is a right that preexists government and that cannot legitimately be infringed upon by government. Liberty entails having the natural, God-given right to decide for one’s self what to do with his own money. If people don’t want to donate to a college or university, that is their right. It’s their money, not the school’s, not society’s, and not the state’s. One might say, “Jacob, if people weren’t forced to subsidize colleges and universities, they would go out of business. There would be no more institutions of higher learning.” But doesn’t that critique expose the real nature of the problem when it comes to freedom? It’s saying that a free people might choose to use their money in ways that don’t involve donations to higher education and, therefore, that it’s necessary to force them to fund colleges and universities. How can force and freedom be reconciled given that they are opposites? Moreover, the fact is that in a genuinely free society there would likely be lots of people who would voluntarily choose to donate to higher education. Many years ago, two colleges — Hillsdale College in Michigan and Grove City College in Pennsylvania — refused to accept government monies, not only on moral grounds but also on the basis that they didn’t want to come under government control, which comes with the receipt of tax monies. Those two schools are still in existence and still prospering, voluntarily and independently. Moreover, churches all across America rely entirely on voluntary support, not tax-funded largess. If they can do it, why can’t colleges and universities? Americans should reject all the political freebies that both Republicans and Democrats offer them in return for their votes and instead raise their vision to a higher level, one that asks the following question: What does it mean to be free? Once people reflect deeply on that question, they are likely to arrive at the following answer: At the very least, freedom means that everyone has the right to do what he wants with his own money. That inevitably leads to more questions: Why should anyone be forced to fund colleges and universities or anyone else with his own money? Why shouldn’t people be free to make that call for themselves on a purely voluntary basis? This article was originally published at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's rush to judgement that Iran was behind the apparent attacks on two tanker ships last week has not galvanized world opinion against Iran, as the neocons hoped. Instead, it was met with high skepticism even among Washington's closest allies. Has the neocon practice of massively exaggerating and endlessly issuing threats finally destroyed US credibility on the world stage?
If Trump Campaigned On His Current Policies, Would He Have Even Made It Out Of The Primaries?6/17/2019
Donald Trump is out there, upset, that we didn't get more monetary stimulus from the Fed. But we got record fiscal stimulus from Congress and the White House.
America was never meant to be an Empire. Liberty and Empire are mutually exclusive. But alas the road of Empire was taken long before any of us were born, and it has been in steady decline for the last 50 years. Empires always end in a melange of moral and financial bankruptcy. America is following this script to the letter.
Just as the prime minister of Japan was in an historic visit to Iran (the first since the 1979 revolution), a Japanese-owned tanker (and one other) was attacked in the Persian Gulf. US neocons are pointing the finger at Iran. Does it make sense to attack Japan in the midst of productive talks?
The best way to look at tariffs or import quotas or other protectionist restraints is to forget about political boundaries.
In an unfolding scandal you won't much hear about in the mainstream media, the US State Department has been caught funding NGOs that are attacking Americans who express opposition to the neocon policy of confrontation with Iran. This is beyond just propaganda and into the realm of actual attacks - exactly the tactics the US decries in authoritarian regimes overseas.
By Liberty Report Staff
Peter Schiff had a few choice words on a recent podcast about President Trump's trade war: What a lot of people overlook is that China doesn't have this massive trade surplus with the entire world. They have a massive trade surplus with America. They have a deficit with most other countries. So they have to take the money they earn selling to us and they use it to buy the stuff they need from other people.
Peter on the idea that the trade war will magically cause corporations to bring their businesses back to the U.S.:
Yeah, how are they going to do that?
A century ago, Americans were duped into the idea of a big and overarching government.
The 'land of the free' would become the land of the bureaucrats. No one wants to produce in America because government is overbearing with regulations, bureaucracies, dictates and edicts. President Trump should be tearing down all of these roadblocks, but he is not. Instead, Trump has embarked on a trade war that can do nothing but lower the standard of living for the average American even further.
By Jeff Deist
Judy Shelton's recent interview with the Financial Times is nothing short of remarkable. Her comments represent the most substantive attack on the Fed, and central banking generally, by any potential nominee to the Fed board in recent history. She not only challenges how Jerome Powell and Fed officials conduct monetary policy, but whether they can conduct it competently at all. Consider this salvo against the Fed's inescapable role as central planner: How can a dozen, slightly less than a dozen, people meeting eight times a year, decide what the cost of capital should be versus some kind of organically, market supply determined rate? The Fed is not omniscient. They don’t know what the right rate should be. How could anyone?” Ms Shelton said. “If the success of capitalism depends on someone being smart enough to know what the rate should be on everything . . . we’re doomed. We might as well resurrect Gosplan,” she said, referring to the state committee that ran the Soviet Union’s planned economy.
And her attack on the Fed's outsized role in the economy:
She also said that the Fed should continue to reduce its balance sheet below the $3.5tn target set by Jay Powell, the chairman. “I would rather the Fed be less of an entity. When a central bank buys up government debt, that’s the beginning of compromised finances.”
She also recognizes malinvestment:
“It’s the distorting aspect of the Fed that is the worst aspect — it’s a wag-the-dog situation. People are fixated on the Fed and are making money by arbitraging, trillions of a second after the latest FOMC announcement,” she added.
And she isn't afraid to support a role for gold in monetary policy:
Ms Shelton has long been sympathetic to the gold standard, which the US fully abandoned in the early 1970s in favour of a flexible exchange rate for the dollar. “People call me a goldbug, and I think, well, what does that make them? A Fed bug,” she says.
"Fed Bugs"! Why didn't we think of this?
Shelton, who works as an economic adviser to Trump, is not an economist by training. Her PhD in business administration, from Utah State no less, is sure to draw jeers from the Ivy League central bank crowd. But it's Ivy League economists, after all, who created the last crisis in 2008. And needless to say they're sounding alarm bells about Mrs. Shelton. The worst offender is former Treasury official Larry Summers, who shamelessly calls Shelton "dangerous." Sorry, but a financial terrorist and chief architect of the weaponized derivatives market in the 2000s should have the simple decency to keep quiet and thank his lucky stars he's not in jail. Judy Shelton is not an Austrian. She appears mostly aligned with the supply-side camp of her longtime friend and mentor Larry Kudlow, who heads the Trump administration's (useless) National Economic Council. And her support for a modified gold standard rests on shaky ground, as she unfortunately favors a rules-based approach under which the Fed would target a dollar price for gold—what Joe Salerno refers to as "price-rule monetarism." So Shelton doesn't want to End the Fed. But in the parlance of woke America, she's an "ally." Recognizing the limits of central bank omniscience, and challenging its benevolence, are important first steps on the road to redeeming our money and our economy. This article was originally published at The Mises Institute.
Afghanistan - the "good war" that never ends. Just when it seemed the US was making progress toward ending the longest war in its history, a new bad guy has emerged that, we are told, is far more threatening than the guys we've been fighting for 20 years. Forget the Taliban! We have to stay in Afghanistan to fight ISIS! Meanwhile, Trump has dropped more bombs on Afghanistan this year alone than Obama's average over five years. War is good for business.
|
Archives
April 2024
|