Monthly Archives: July 2012

This post is prompted by the recent insightful and timely essay by Niall Ferguson, a distinguished historian and public intellectual, on the massive public debt being run up by Western democracies in order to sustain their entitlement programs, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9338997/Reith-Lecture-Were-mortgaging-the-future-of-the-younger-generation.html. I have on a number of prior occasions remarked that our state largely functions as one giant machine for the redistribution of resources, generally from ordinary citizens and taxpayers to financially powerful and politically well-connected groups, or to those constituencies who have weight just by virtue of their numbers. Hence, our addiction to bailouts; entitlement programs; subsidies; corporate tax loopholes and credits; protective trade policies; licensure laws; our labor code; and coercive measures of every imaginable type, designed to enrich certain citizens at the expense of others.  Continue Reading »