Monthly Archives: June 2010

Per-capita wealth and poverty in a given political economy is strongly correlated both with economic freedom and oppression and with the perception of integrity or corruption among government officials.

Countries that pursue policies of economic freedom have rich populations. Countries that obstruct free enterprise have poor populations. The relative wealth or poverty of a given population is strongly correlated with and can be readily predicted from the level of economic oppression in that political economy. This is easily understood from Austrian and Classical economic […] Continue reading

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How Socialism makes beggars of free people: “The predictable result of these efforts at preventing the exploitation of man by man was the collapse of production, pauperizing an already poor country.”

Theodore Dalrymple reflects on how the imposition of a Marxist redistributionist policy impoverishes what had been a self-sustaining economy: I next spent a few years (1983 to 1986) in Tanzania, a country that presented another experiment in treating poverty as a matter of maldistribution. Julius Nyerere, the first—and, until then, the only—president, had been in […] Continue reading

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The first word in “free enterprise” is “free” — how economic fallacies are deployed to frustrate human liberty.

In a comment to my post on the NAR’s most recent attempts to rape the taxpayers, Michael Cook set forth a number of subtle economic fallacies. I am not picking on Michael. He is simply repeating Marxist propaganda that is ubiquitous, more’s the pity. But I thought it were well to take these claims apart, […] Continue reading

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Bubba cools out in the cold

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story News is not my thing, but sometimes it falls into your lap. That’s what Bubba did — literally. He was half in the bag and he stumbled and tripped and landed his sloppy self right on me. For a while he just laid half across my lap, grinning stupidly at […] Continue reading

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Mary Canary on her way to feed the pigeons

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story “I married myself a quiet man. He told me so himself, many times. When he was drunk, he’d shout it to the world.” Mary Canary said that. She says stuff like that just to make sure no one’s listening. And no one on the bus was, no one except me. […] Continue reading

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