The government today does not see us as individuals with the right to make choices about our own health care. Instead, over the last hundred years, the government has increasingly forced us to make different choices.
In a recent debate on the welfare state, I was asked whether I thought it was important to help others. That, I said, was not the right question. In a free society, people help others all the time — parents help children, neighbors help neighbors, private charities help orphans.
Elizabeth Warren and many of the other people recklessly seeking to expand Social Security, which is already on an unsustainable course, justify their crusade by claiming that America is facing a retirement crisis. Millions of older Americans, they say, cannot afford to retire: Social Security doesn’t pay enough and they haven't saved sufficiently on their own.
In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel F. Craviotto Jr., an orthopedic surgeon, writes eloquently about the government’s increasing intervention in the practice of medicine. He illustrates some of the ways (though there are many more) by which the government has come to increasingly control doctors’ time, efforts and income — i.e., their lives.
Michael Bromwich has issued his first report. Bromwich is the antitrust monitor empowered by a federal court to “reform” Apple Inc.’s corporate culture from within. Be afraid . . . be very afraid.
In this episode of The Debt Dialogues, I talk with philosopher Harry Binswanger about inequality, the motive behind egalitarianism, and why opponents of the welfare state should reject the idea of “equality of opportunity.”
Once again, some of America’s most admired and innovative companies — in this case Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, and LucasFilm — have fallen victim to an antitrust shakedown.
For years, many craft brewers in Florida have been directly working with the stores that sell their products. But now Florida lawmakers are entertaining a bill that will make such direct dealings illegal, forcing craft brewers to instead use state-licensed distributors as middlemen.
One strain of argument for the welfare state contends that because you have benefited from the welfare state, you have an obligation to fund the welfare state.
Somewhere near the bottom of Dante’s nine levels of hell rest the “squeegee bandits.” These were the guys who waited for your car to stop at a traffic light, and then — without permission — quickly squeegeed your windshield “clean.”
