Thinking

The Neglect of Thinking (by Henry Hazlitt)

more school choice

Rand Paul wants more school choice for poor, minority students:

He wants more public charter schools. He wants more vouchers, so that students can use tax money to enroll in private schools. He says students ought to be able to attend any public school in a community, regardless of their neighborhood and property lines.

“I’m talking about opening up all of the lines, so that kids can go to public, to private, wherever,” said Paul, a tea party favorite and potential 2016 presidential candidate. “Some of these schools are absolutely pitiful, absolutely. What I’m really proposing is helping these kids get out from the grind.”

Parents participating in the voucher program should be allowed to send their children to the private schools of their choice, Paul said.

“They’re not using government money,” he said, referring to the tax dollars funneled to vouchers. “It’s our money. We’re getting back some of the money taken from us. I think when you have choice, people choose the better product. I think it’s presumptuous of anyone to question parental authority.”

Regulating Statism

John Stossel - The Reality Of Regulation

How statists do not think

How Statists Think (Or, Don't): Their Top 20 Traits por Lawrence E. Reed:

1. They spend more time promoting dependency than they do encouraging self-reliance.

3. They think intentions matter far more than actual results.

4. They lump people into groups and assign them fictitious rights.

5. They learn little or nothing from history or economics.

6. They think emotions, slogans and bumper-stickers trump reason and logic.

7. Compassion is their favorite word even as they put a gun to your head.

8. They respect property if it's theirs, but not if it's yours.

10. Individuals are never among the minorities they say they support.

12. They think a welfare check is an entitlement, but a paycheck isn't.

13. When their policies flop, they assume no responsibility and demand more of the same.

14. They're always busy reforming you even if their own lives are dysfunctional.

15. They claim to know the future (e.g., which industry to subsidize) while showing no evidence they even understand the past.

16. They dislike business less because they have sound arguments against it and more because they have no idea how to start or run one themselves.

20. They appeal to the worst in us by emphasizing racial divisions, pitting class against class, and buying votes with other people's money.

Escravidão

Os escravos por João Pereira Coutinho:

Quem perde um minuto de tempo com os escravos da Índia, da Nigéria, da Etiópia ou do Congo?

Ninguém. Onde não existe homem branco como capataz, também não existe homem negro como escravo.

The Truth About Slavery: Past, Present and Future

O Inimigo é o Estado

As Finanças/As SS nazis por Daniel Deusdado:

As Finanças são um Estado prepotente (sem aspas nem metáforas), amoral, dentro de um país que tenta sobreviver à sistemática e brutal cobrança e aumento de impostos. Ainda vamos brevemente descobrir que boa parte do sucesso das exportações inclui também uma coisa óbvia: as mercadorias vão mas o lucro não volta. O Fisco está enganado se pensa que mete os empresários em campos de concentração fiscais (onde estão os trabalhadores por conta de outrem e pensionistas). O inimigo é comum - o Fisco. A ordem é "fugir". O ódio ao Estado é total. Lutar contra a carga fiscal é como militar na Resistência.

Government out of School

John Stossel - Expelling Govt From School

Sobre o Mal

Concealing Evil por Walter E. Williams:

Evil acts are given an aura of moral legitimacy by noble-sounding socialistic expressions, such as spreading the wealth, income redistribution, caring for the less fortunate, and the will of the majority. Let’s have a thought experiment to consider just how much Americans sanction evil.

Imagine there are several elderly widows in your neighborhood. They have neither the strength to mow their lawns .. Would you support a government mandate that forces you or one of your neighbors to mow these elderly widows’ lawns .. ? .. I’m hoping, and I believe, that most of my fellow Americans would .. agree that it would be a form of slavery — namely, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.

Would there be the same condemnation if, instead .. the government forced you or your neighbor to give one of the widows $50 of your weekly earnings? .. I’d answer that there is little difference between the two mandates except the mechanism for the servitude. In either case, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another.

I’m guessing that most Americans would want to help these elderly ladies in need but they’d find anything that openly smacks of servitude or slavery deeply offensive.

.. This collective mechanism makes the particular victim invisible, but it doesn’t change the fact that a person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of others. Putting the money into a government pot simply conceals an act that would otherwise be deemed morally depraved.

.. socialism is evil. It employs evil means, confiscation and intimidation, to accomplish what are often seen as noble goals — namely, helping one’s fellow man. Helping one’s fellow man in need by reaching into one’s own pockets to do so is laudable and praiseworthy. Helping one’s fellow man through coercion and reaching into another’s pockets is evil and worthy of condemnation. Tragically, most teachings, from the church on down, support government use of one person to serve the purposes of another; the advocates cringe from calling it such and prefer to call it charity or duty.

Some might argue that we are a democracy, in which the majority rules. But does a majority consensus make moral acts that would otherwise be deemed immoral? ..

Stupid regulation

Ashton Kutcher on Jimmy Kimmel Live PART 1

Fascism (hearts) Socialism

So total is the Left's cultural ascendancy that no one likes to mention the socialist roots of fascism:

'I am a Socialist,' Hitler told Otto Strasser in 1930, 'and a very different kind of Socialist from your rich friend, Count Reventlow'.

No one at the time would have regarded it as a controversial statement. The Nazis could hardly have been more open in their socialism, describing themselves with the same terminology as our own SWP: National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Almost everyone in those days accepted that fascism had emerged from the revolutionary Left. Its militants marched on May Day under red flags. Its leaders stood for collectivism, state control of industry, high tariffs, workers' councils. Around Europe, fascists were convinced that, as Hitler told an enthusiastic Mussolini in 1934, 'capitalism has run its course'.

One of the most stunning achievements of the modern Left is to have created a cultural climate where simply to recite these facts is jarring. History is reinterpreted ..

Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism:

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”

curto-circuitando socialistas

Oliver Stone going in circles on redistribution

Yes, the Wealthy Can Be Deserving

Yes, the Wealthy Can Be Deserving:

To be sure, some people find ways to get rich at others’ expense. Bernard Madoff most famously comes to mind. The solution here, however, is not to focus on the income distribution but to devise better regulation and oversight.

So, by delivering extraordinary performances in hit films, top stars may do more than entertain millions of moviegoers and make themselves rich in the process. They may also contribute many millions in federal taxes, and other millions in state taxes. And those millions help fund schools, police departments and national defense for the rest of us.

Unlike the superheroes of “The Avengers,” the richest 1 percent aren’t motivated by an altruistic desire to advance the public good. But, in most cases, that is precisely their effect.

no unions - a better profit for all

Das 'No' to Big Labor: VW Workers Reject UAW

guerra de classes

O partido socialista de embalagem laranja anda a escolher a sua narrativa -- ora diz que é reformista, ora diz que a reforma do Estado ainda está por fazer; o partido socialista de embalagem rosa escandaliza-se e diz exactamente o contrário -- e exactamente o mesmo. O facto é que o Estado continua a ser uma massiva máquina de impedimento da criação de riqueza, de extorsão dos frutos de trabalho honesto, de compra e manutenção de massas votantes, de instigação de guerra social, de destruição da manutenção de normas sociais civilizadas, e o ganha-pão de muito político e burocrata. Há que votar nos outros partidos do "arco da governabilidades" para mudar tudo isto.

Versão Simplificada Do Orçamento De Estado Para 2014

Consumer Advocacy Vs Self-Interest

Milton Friedman - Consumer Advocacy Vs Self-Interest

The Beauty of Libertarianism

The Logical Beauty of Libertarianism por Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

Would the change from a statist to a libertarian society help or hinder the production of high culture?

Hoppe: A libertarian society would be significantly more prosperous and wealthy and this would certainly help both low and high culture. But a free society — a society without taxes and tax-subsidies and without so-called “intellectual property rights” — would produce a very different culture, with a very different set of products, producers, stars, and failures.

If you could magically change one belief in the minds of all people in present societies, what would it be and why?

Hoppe: I agree in this with my principal teacher, mentor, and master Murray Rothbard. I would only want people to recognize matters for what they truly are. I would want them to recognize taxes as robbery, politicians as thieves, and the entire state apparatus and bureaucracy as a protection racket, a Mafia-like enterprise, only far bigger and more dangerous. In short: I would want them to hate the State. If everyone believed and did this, then, as É. de la Boétie has shown, all power of the state would almost instantly vanish.

Merit and Productivity

Thomas Sowell - Merit and Productivity

On Moral Education

On Moral Education por Herbert Spencer:

Bear constantly in mind the truth that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed by others. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but as they are by and by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye. Aim, therefore, to diminish the amount of parental government as fast as you can substitute for it in your child’s mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results. In infancy a considerable amount of absolutism is necessary. A three-year-old urchin playing with an open razor, cannot be allowed to learn by this discipline of consequences; for the consequences may, in such case, be too serious. But as intelligence increases, the number of instances calling for peremptory interference may be, and should be diminished; with the view of gradually ending them as maturity is approached. All periods of transition are dangerous; and the most dangerous is the transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the world. Hence the importance of pursuing the policy we advocate; which, alike by cultivating a child’s faculty of self-restraint, by continually increasing the degree in which it is left to its self-constraint, and by so bringing it, step by step, to a state of unaided self-constraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from externally-governed youth to internally-governed maturity.

O Papa anticapitalista

The Pope vs. Capitalism and Human Progress: Q/A with Cato's Marian Tupy

guerra de classes

Numa altura em que o PSD, partido dos socialistas envergonhados, discute se regressa ou não à social-democracia de onde nunca saiu, convém perceber a o que é o paraíso fiscal social-democrata; « 65% dos portugueses não paga IRS. 90% todos juntos representam 30% das receitas.10% dos contribuintes português pagam os restantes 70%. Sendo que 5% dos contribuintes pagam quase 60%. » E os proletários que sustentam este "capital" político nada tem a perder, senão as suas grilhetas.

Quem paga o estado social?

the State, parasite

The State is a Parasite on Society

Rant Liberal do Dia

No dia-a-dia ninguém toma diz "quem me dera que o meu supermercado de bairro fosse gerido com a repartição de finanças" ou "o que era porreiro era que as minhas contas tivessem a mesma saúde fnanceira de uma empresa pública" ou "eu queria era que os meus filhos tivessem o carácter de um presidente de câmara".

Isto porque, ideologias mais grotescas à parte, está à vista que tecnicamente é uma imbecilidade meter qualquer coisa para gerir nas mãos de políticos e burocratas.

Se o supermercado de bairro funcionasse como a repartição de finanças -- algo que aconteceria se políticos e burocratas tentassem os extremamemente exigentes sistemas de distribuição --, alguns de nós ("liberais") diriam que outro mundo é possível -- um mundo onde as pessoas não fossem obrigadas a dirigir-se ao único supermercado do bairro, e a tirar senha, e a rezar não terem deixado em casa os papéis necessários para comprar as couves e o papel higiénico.

Se o supermercado de bairro funcionasse tão bem quanto a repartição de finanças, e viesse alguém dizer que era melhor deixar as coisas com o mercado privado, não deixaria de haver quem viesse dizer o que "eles" (os "neoliberais") querem é favorecer os ricos, os poderosos, os grandes interesses; e que o resultado de tais sugestões criaria fome e pestilência, e destruiria uma das joias da coroa do "Estado Social".

Este tipo de respostas claro diz muito sobre os defensores do status quo estatista, que não suportam ver os seus miseráveis estalinismos contestados. O "dizer muito" aqui não se refere à inteligência, ou lógica, ou capacidade de argumentação, ou conhecimento, ou cultura... destes cães-de-fila bem condicionados.

O facto é que no poder, e a defender quem está no poder, há uma turba "junkie" do poder sobre os outros. São sociopatas que não concebem outra forma de viver sem sociedade sem comando estatal, um só modelo para todos, e nada contra o Estado --nem outra forma de argumentar que não seja conjurando cenários tremendistas absurdos (nb sem supermercados estatais as pessoas terão de recorrer ao canibalismo). Ora, isto é coisa de brutos.

Num tema como "Cultura", em que supostamente existe uma elite defensora da sensibilidade contra a barbárie, tamanha falta de sofisticação naturalmente emergiu - quando se argumenta que não cabe ao Estado especular em "Arte", alguns responderam que já só falta venderem os Jerónimos ou os Painéis de São Vicente de Fora.