You’ve probably heard this before: America is facing a serious debt crisis. Economists estimate that the unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare amount to roughly $200 trillion. That’s about $400,000 per American.
The other day I was thumbing through an interesting book, Pursuing Liberty: America Through the Eyes of the Newly Free, which contains interviews with eight American immigrants. It really captured what I think is one of the most notable and admirable characteristics of immigrants to this country: how many of them come expecting to work for a better life. They value freedom, not because it makes life easy, but because it makes success possible.
Wall Street executive Steven Rattner recently had a piece in the New York Times bemoaning rising inequality, and the fact that voters don’t seem to care about it. But we should care, argues Rattner: “Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013,” Rattner writes, “with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose [by 2 percent].”
On November 4, 2014, ARI fellow Don Watkins gave his talk “End the Debt Draft: How the Welfare State Is Exploiting Millennials” to the Capitalism and Global Supply Chains class at Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.
It's really a shame that we let Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme collapse. We could have kept it going for a long time had we forced people to pour more money into it.
Michael Tanner: “[M]ore than one out of every three Americans live in households that are now on welfare. Looked at another way, America’s welfare state now has nearly three times the population of the largest actual state. . . . And none of these numbers include the middle-class social-welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security. Counting these programs, more than 153 million Americans, nearly half the population (49.5 percent), are living in households now dependent on government for a significant portion of their income.”
You may have heard about “inversions,” which have become a hot topic of debate in the wake of Burger King’s acquisition of Tim Hortons. Megan McArdle provides some much-needed context for that debate (although my jaw dropped when I got to her line about “what you owe the government that raised you”). Cato Institute scholar and Debt Dialogues guest Dan Mitchell has more.
In Free Market Fairness, Brown University political science professor John Tomasi seeks to defend free markets on a Rawlsian “social justice” foundation. In laying the groundwork for his argument, Tomasi thinks it is notable that even most free-market thinkers appeal to “social justice” concerns, i.e., that they almost all — from Adam Smith to Herbert Spencer to Milton Friedman — stress that free markets are good for “the poor.”
I’ve entered Think Freely Media’s 2014 Great Communicators Tournament, which asks entrants to make moral argument for freedom. I hope you’ll take a moment to vote for my entry, and to share it with your friends. You can vote once a day, every day, until September 2.
