“The Future In Review”

The Future In Review...

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KA-POW! #32 - Fedako

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Jim Fedako for “The New Bureaucratic Man” :

There is something to Trotsky's vision of man under communism. From all historical appearances, man under a totalitarian state functions differently than a man under liberty. And degrees of man exist as society slowly turns from liberty to slavery.

...

One year, at the beginning of spring, a duck built a nest in the moat, under one of the many bushes. As her ducklings hatched and grew, it came time for them to search for water. However, despite their repeated attempts, the ducklings could not jump from the moat to the walkway bridge.

KA-POW! #29 - Tucker

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Jeffrey A. Tucker for “Are We a Self-Hating Commercial Society?” :

I'm on a Sunday walk and a nice boy tries to sell me lemonade. A budding entrepreneur! Still, I decline. So he strengthens his pitch: "I'm donating the profits to stop child abuse."

...

This proves that the traditional rap on capitalism is false. It is not only about private gain for the few. Business can be as enlightened as the individuals running them. Note that all this praiseworthy other-directedness is being accomplished within the matrix of exchange, which has wrongly been maligned as selfish. As we can see, there is no contradiction between doing good and doing well. All these innovations that merge the third sector of charity with the first sector of profiteering illustrate that capitalism can adapt itself to an age of broad-minded social concern.

KA-POW! #25 - Read

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Leonard Read for “Find the Wrong, and There's the Right” :

Man, on the other hand, does not now possess a like set of instinctual do-nots: built-in prohibitions. Instead, he must enjoy or suffer the consequences of his own free will, his own power to choose between what's right and what's wrong. In a word, man is more or less at the mercy of his own imperfect understanding and conscious decisions.

KA-POW! #14 - Mises

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Ludwig von Mises for “Free Banking and Contract Law” :

It is a fable that governments interfered with banking in order to restrict the issue of fiduciary media and to prevent credit expansion. The idea that guided governments was, on the contrary, the lust for inflation and credit expansion. They privileged banks because they wanted to widen the limits drawn to credit expansion by conditions prevailing on the unhampered market or because they were eager to open to the treasury a source of revenue.

KA-POW! #10 - Douglass

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to student Brian Douglass for “On the Road to the Servile State” :

Belloc defines the Servile State as "that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor." ...

The Servile State is not the market economy. It is also not simply socialism. Instead, it is a creation of the State to benefit a class, which is considered free, and for which class the system is perpetuated by force of law. Essentially, it is a State marked by artificial, government-created monopolies. ...

KA-POW! #6 - Staib

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to student Eric M. Staib for “Obamacare is a Devastating Tax on the Working Class” :

The implication of this increased cost is that workers [with individual coverage] whose revenue productivity is less than $300 [or nearly $700 for those with family coverage] per month higher than their wages will be laid off, or have their hours cut to the level that will classify them as part-time. Ignoring established labor law, the bill leaves the definition of part-time and full-time to the discretion of the Commissioner of Obama's massive new health bureaucracy. The lower the new "Health Choices Commissioner" sets the threshold in an attempt to maximize the number of people receiving the employer contribution, the more hours of production employers will have to shave off to push their employees under the threshold, and the less those workers will take home in wages each week.

KA-POW! #4 - Mises

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Ludwig von Mises for “Freedom Is Slavery" :

There prevails in the writings of many contemporary authors the disposition to represent every extension of governmental power and every restriction of the individual's discretion as a measure of liberation, as a step forward on the road to liberty. Carried to its ultimate logical conclusion, this mode of reasoning leads to the inference that socialism, the complete abolition of the individual's faculty to plan his own life and conduct, brings perfect freedom. It was this reasoning that suggested to socialists and Communists the idea of arrogating to themselves the appellation liberal.