While there is a good deal of cant about how paying higher taxes is “patriotic,” most people instinctively recoil from taxes and don’t hesitate to avoid paying any more than they have to. So, is taxation moral? Income tax season is mostly over. For our family it just ended a week ago when the IRS [...]
If it’s time to “defund” the police department of Minneapolis, maybe it’s also time to “defund” the K-12 sector of what passes for public education in Minnesota. The idea is to fund parents instead. The radical idea of school choice will directly empower parents, which is something that defunding the police will not do. In [...]
No government has ever made itself permanently wealthy through the plunder of its people—which destroys not just the productive capacity of a country but also its moral foundations. Though a classic in its own right, and arguably the first book on conservatism in the modern world, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790 is [...]
To recover our social traditions and the cultural knowledge undergirding them will be the job of generations. But we should work to reduce the harm visited on our society by universities increasingly dedicated to identity politics and to indoctrinating students into that politics… The problem with reforms is that they almost always are thinly-veiled programs [...]
Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” is not a call to activism or a program for some version of social justice. It is, rather, a manifesto of political and social libertarianism that displays both the strengths and weaknesses of that trend in American thought. Henry David Thoreau’s long essay, first published under the title “Resistance to Civil Government,” [...]
We have been hearing a great deal about income inequality in recent days, particularly from Senator Bernie Sanders. Part of this interest is fueled by many examples of excess at the top. J.P. Morgan Chase, after a year immersed in scandal, decided to award its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, $20 million in compensation for 2013. [...]
One does not hear much about the “flat tax” any longer. The idea lost its steam when people pointed out that, in order for it to significantly lower most people’s effective tax rate, it would have to include (that is, eliminate) some very well-entrenched tax breaks we all love. Most prominent among these is the [...]
According to Kimberly Strassel (and this is the general line of the Wall Street Journal), conservatives are those who believe that government should do as little as possible to inhibit to the operation of the free market and as much as possible to maximize the free choice of individuals. Everyone will be better off as a result. Any deviation [...]
The greatest editorialist of our age, Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal, is at it again. Mr. Rago profiled two investors in Philadelphia who are resisting government pressure to admit that they did something wrong when trading in the electricity marketplace. The investors’ case is that everything they did was transparently legal. The feds don’t care—if they [...]
Sen. Carl Levin was aghast. Before his committee sat, unapologetic and uncontrite, Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose company had paid no U.S. corporate income taxes on the $74 billion it had earned abroad in recent years. “Apple has sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” said Levin. “Apple has exploited an absurdity.” […]
Mitt Romney has conceded that his thoughts, expressed at that Boca Raton, Fla., fundraiser, were “not elegantly” stated. Those mocking him might concede he has tabled one of the mega-issues of our time. Can America continue down the path President Obama is taking us on, to a time soon and certain when a majority of [...]