Showing posts with label redistribution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label redistribution. Show all posts

Friday, July 04, 2014

Reason Magazine: A Slippery Slope In the Right Direction?

Reason has an excellent article up about not only why the Hobby Lobby ruling was correct, but also why it didn’t go far enough. This part perfectly encapsulates the Libertarian argument:

A group of politicians cannot legitimately have the power to compel one group of people—employers, taxpayers, or insurers—to pay for things that another group wants. That's immoral, and it violates inalienable rights. Moreover, when government has the power to issue such commands—always backed by force, let us never forget—it sets off a mad interest-group scramble for control of the government machinery—because control is a license to steal. Is it any wonder that people are willing to spend billions of dollars to influence who makes government policy? If people face the alternative of controlling the government or being controlled by it, those who have resources will buy power and influence, even if only in self-defense.

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) say the court decision permits the favored employers to make health-care decisions for women. No it doesn't. It only prohibits women, unfortunately in only a narrow set of cases, from being able to use government to force their employers to pay for those decisions. When did we start equating the right to buy contraceptives—which hardly anyone disputes—with the power to compel others to pay? It is demagogic to insist that prohibiting the latter violates the former.

Read the whole thing.

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Thursday, March 14, 2013

Milton Freedman on the Most Persistent Economic Fallacy of All Time

This is Milton Freedman on the fallacy that Economics is about money. Economics is about production and when the government takes money from the productive sector of the economy and spends it, it is not growing the economy.

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Sunday, October 30, 2011

P.J. O'Rourke on Why "Closing the Wealth Gap" is a Bad Idea

P.J. O'Rourke explains why efforts to close the "wealth gap" are a a bad idea and destined to fail, as they have everytime they've been tried. This gets to the heart of the matter:

But proposing to close the "wealth gap" is worse than silly. It entails a lie. The notion of economic equality is based on an ancient and ugly falsehood central to bad economic thinking: There's a fixed amount of wealth. Wealth is zero-sum. If I have too many cups of tea, you have to lick the tea pot. But wealth is based on productivity. Productivity is expandable. Otherwise there wouldn't be any economic thinking, good or bad, or any tea or tea pots either.


Read the whole thing.

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Monday, October 27, 2008

Obama Talking Openly About Redistribution of Wealth

(via Boortz) This is a more than 4 minute segment from an interview Obama gave to a local Chicago public radio station when he was still an Illinois legislator. In it he talks openly and with some detail on why he thinks the courts should be used to force redistribution of wealth in the name of "political and economic justice."


Don't tell me this guy isn't a Marxist. If you're thinking of pulling the lever for 0bama, think carefully about what that means if you do.

Update: Bill Whittle analyzes the clip.
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