Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Writing about the off-the-charts fraud and abuse of Covid “relief” programs, James Freeman homes in nicely on a key point (“The Great American Rip-Off,” June 12):
For that matter perhaps the people who endorsed the idea of shuttering much of the U.S. economy in response to Covid-19, expanding the Federal Reserve balance sheet by nearly $4 trillion and adding more than $4 trillion to the nation’s publicly held debt can explain if their strategy depends on whether the recipients of cash are lawful or law-abiding. When one is dumping money out of a helicopter it’s not so easy to dictate who catches it.
That Bernie Bros, New York Times staffers, CNN reporters, and other Progressives – along with power-drunk government officials of diverse persuasions – urged that Covid be fought with unprecedented, act-now-ask-questions-later expansions of government power isn’t surprising. What is surprising is the silence over the past 18 months – your pages being an admirable exception – of so many wise voices upon which we usually depend to check the presumptions and dangerous schemes of those who treat government as able to act with the benevolence, knowledge, and abilities of God.
With so many otherwise dependable voices rendered mute by fear of Covid, we lost a far more justified and productive fear – to wit, fear of unchecked government power. We’ll live for years with the economic and fiscal carnage. Worse, we’ll live for generations with the terrible precedent that treats an encounter with any unusually high risk as justification for disproportionate – indeed, unrestrained – assaults on human freedom.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
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Part of the moral aura surrounding preferential policies is due to the belief that such policies benefit the less fortunate. The losers in this presumed redistribution are seldom specified, though the underlying assumption seems to be that they are the more fortunate.
[T]he more things improve the louder become the exclamations about their badness.
Still, from a pluralist perspective, the best way to defend liberty is to begin with the observation that day-to-day morality is libertarian. There is a presumption of liberty. By default, we presume people should be free to live as they see best, without having to ask permission or justify themselves to other people. By default, all restrictions on liberty are presumed wrong and unjust, until shown otherwise. Coercive interference with others’ liberty must be justified. Political authority and all laws are assumed unjustified until shown otherwise.
It would perhaps be easier to find an inverse correlation between political activity and economic success than a direct correlation. Groups that have the skills for other things seldom concentrate on politics. Moreover, politics has special disadvantages for ethnic minority groups, however much it may benefit individual ethnic leaders. Public displays of ethnic solidarity and/or chauvinism are the life blood of ethnic politics. Yet chauvinism almost invariably provokes counter-chauvinism.
We require in an honest man, not submission, but resistance and independence.
