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Government is not reason, it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master.
--George Washington
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Against inanimate objects force is a hammer, against human beings it is a gun. Force should be used only as the last option in only the most legitimate of circumstances. For example, should abortion be legal or illegal? Illegal abortion is force against the mother, legal abortion is force against the child. Is it murder? Abortion is certainly close, and clearly inelegant, and parties on both sides of the issue should be doing what they can to minimize the need for it. Force is the opposite of freedom. When you engage in trade by spending money on a product or service, you are both exercising your freedom and making a small vote on that that product and its vendor. When taxes are taken from you, it is both an application of force against you and a reduction in your freedom. The only legitimate use of force is defense of property against illegitimate force.
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It's good to be the king!
--Mel Brooks
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One may be forgiven for confusing www.Whitehouse.gov and www.Whitehouse.com. There seems to be a human reflex to look to an external authority to solve problems, and recent presidents have been all too ready to play the role of King, even though in the USA the Chief Executive should merely be like the Chief Executive Officer of a large corporation that provides a limited set of services as defined in the contract (known as the Constitution). In fact, the President has even less decision-making power than a CEO, because his role is merely to execute the decisions made by Congress, the people's representatives. But even more than his predecessors, Clinton has taken to ruling by decree with executive orders to accomplish his objectives. Americans don't need a tsar!
Flag-burners and other desecration variationists are crude, primitive, and best ignored. The worst possible response is to try to save the symbol at the expense of the principles it stands for, especially freedom of speech. No one has stated this more eloquently than Roger Pilon in his testimony before Congress. Those advocating the amendment in Congress are misguided patriots at best, cynical politicians at worst. Check out The Flag-Burning Page for more info.
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It is because they have mistaken the dawn for a conflagration that theologians have so often been the foes of light.
--quoted by Andrew D. White
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We are not "slouching toward Gomorrah" as some Conservatives describe it, with society no longer resembling their childhood memories. They would have you believe that society is going to hell in a handbasket, even though religious belief is now at an all-time high in American history, and the churches have never been stronger. A more measured description of the very real dislocations caused by technological progress is Francis Fukuyama's The Great Disruption.
Every country has at least one: Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in the US, Le Pen in France, Joerg Haider in Austria, Lebert in Poland, and Zhirinovsky in Russia. Their message and methods are the same: anti-foreign anti-trade, sowing hate and spouting economic fallacies (e.g. free trade hurts local workers and increases unemployment). A Darwinist would say that in the long term Luddites and flat-earthers are a self-correcting problem, but in the short term they can damage a country's prosperity. In her book, Virginia Postrel, former editor of Reason Magazine, describes these "enemies of the future".
Jaded Westerners who have never known war might want to visit People On War to look at it from a safe distance. The political system that reduces war is libertarianism; governments in free societies are much less capable of initiating foreign wars.
Liberals are fond of saying that we could feed all the world's hungry, if only we cared. Indeed, we could, and we should contribute: for example, every time you visit The Hunger Site, the sponsors will pay for a meal for one hungry person. Make it a screensaver. But teach a man to fish, and he'll have food forever--we should spread the principles that lead to prosperity: constitutional democracy, individual freedom, sanctity of property, and the rule of law.
The best solution to disease is prevention, and one of the best means of prevention is immunization. Smallpox was the first and only disease ever eradicated, but now a project is underway to make polio the next. Malaria kills over a million people per year, most of them children, and AIDS threatens millions more.
While war has this century cost millions of lives, by far the most have been killed in cold blood or made to die slowly in artificial famines. There is no question that the greatest source of mass slaughter is government, ironically the institution whose fundamental purpose is the people's protection, the only institution capable of killing on the scale of millions or even tens of millions. For cold hard statistics, read R. J. Rummel's
Death by Government or visit the author's web site about 20th century democide.