The recent vote within the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union has implicitly once again raised the issue of the right of self-determination through secession. In other words, do individuals have a right to determine under which political authority they shall live and have representation?
The fact is both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump represent variations on the same political theme: the interventionist-welfare state, only applied in different ways as they pander to different coalitions of special interest and ideological groups among the American electorate.
The American Spirit of Independence, Innovation and Benevolence
Will the United Kingdom come out of this departure, in the long run, politically and economically stronger or weaker? That depends upon what the citizens of the United Kingdom do with their reestablished democratic self-determination.
Too many in the older generation in America have lost their understanding of what freedom means and why constitutionally limited government is both necessary and desirable. And the vast majority of the young have never been taught in our government-run schools the ideas, ideals, and political institutional foundations upon which this country of ours was created.
Americans will most gain from whatever trading opportunities that may offer themselves around the globe if the U.S. government follows a strict and principled policy of unrestrained and unrestricted free trade with any and all nations of the world.
The Democrats and the Republicans, the progressives on the “left” and the go-along to get-along conservatives on the “right, are the ones who made Donald Trump.
The result of the Federal Reserve’s increase in the money supply, which pushes interest rates below that market-balancing point, is an emerging price inflation and an initial investment boom, both of which are unsustainable in the long run.
The good name of “capitalism” has to be recaptured and restored, just as the good name and concept of “liberalism,” rightly understood, should be returned to the advocates of individual liberty and free enterprise.
The friends of freedom must remind their fellow citizens that the only fundamental political question in any election is whether or not those running for political office unswervingly declare their allegiance to the philosophy of individual rights to life, liberty and property and its accompanying social system of free market capitalism?
Nothing that Lenin or Stalin implemented in Soviet Russia or Mao in China, for example, was not called for or implied in Marx’s own writings and arguments.
It is estimated that as many as 64 million innocent men, women and children were killed in the Soviet Union in the name of building the socialist workers’ paradise.”
When I was about seventeen, and living in Hollywood, I met two men who introduced me to the works of Ayn Rand.
The CPI vs. the Diversity of Real People’s Choices
There are many economic fallacies that surround the issue of freer or open immigration into the United States, and few of them can stand up to serious critical examination.
America was once a “melting pot” of a diversity peoples that over several generations become something different from their ancestors’ national origins: they became Americans.
What is needed is a radical change, and in my opinion, this means the denationalization, the full and complete privatization of schooling from kindergarten through graduate education.
Through all the progressive’s rhetoric about “democracy” and “equality” and “social justice” and “diversity,” theirs is a political philosophy and public policy ideology of elitism, hubris, and authoritarianism.
The danger from the seemingly reasonable pragmatism that President Obama proposes as the norm and ideal for a middle or “third way” between capitalism and socialism is that is constantly moves society away from the competitive market economy and individual liberty and more and more in the direction of greater and more government planning and control over facets and corners of our lives.
The road from political, economic and social individualism to collectivist identity and privilege through group competition for political power is what has brought us to our current political crisis as captured in this year’s presidential campaign.
What actually makes for a more just society experiencing greater opportunity, improved conditions and rising standards of living for virtually all over the long run? In a nutshell, three words: freedom, competition and trade. These are Adam Smith’s “open sesame” to alleviate poverty, privilege, and inequity in society.
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