Think on the margin. Think of the things you like most and the things you dislike the most. Increase somewhat the amount of time you spend on the former and reduce somewhat the time you spend on the latter.

On a case-by-case basis this may seem trivial, but the cumulative effect is hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted on projects like this. Those projects were supposed to “stimulate” the economy. However, no lasting jobs were created, and no net business will be generated as a result of any of these kinds of stimulus efforts. If improvements in one place do cause increased overall traffic, it will simply be at the expense of some other business somewhere else. Contrast wasting money on stimulus projects like the above vs. lowering corporate taxes. Which one has a chance of promoting hiring? It sure is not money wasted on projects and this is another reason why Keynesian stimulus is ludicrous.

The arguments for academic tenure have always struck me as pretty weak, and more to the point, transparently self-serving. The best you can say of the system is that it preserves a sort of continuity in schools that is desirable for the purposes of cultivating alumni donations. But the cost of such a system is simply staggering.

A sounder explanation for economic sluggishness includes the pending expiration of the Bush tax cuts, along with the uncertainties created by passage of the Obama administration’s health care and financial reform bills. A market-based economy is extraordinarily resilient, but cannot forever bear anti-business rhetoric and overweening governmental intrusion into affairs best left to the private sector.

Maywoood, California outsourced all city services including police and fire. The unions predicted dire consequences. Well, not only did the sky not fall, but services have improved.

If you don’t live in this country all of the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans – with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs – demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don’t simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

Politicians are insulated from the consequences of their decisions and are indeed celebrated for the destructive policies they enact. Sowell is explicit about this on page 81: “What they learn is that there is much political mileage to be gained by promoting more home ownership and no political price to be paid for the foreclosures that eventually follow.” Indeed, the practices now called “predatory” were encouraged and called “creative” by those endorsing them as appropriate means to their policy goals.

It was Mises’s early economic-calculation realization — of socialism’s intrinsic inability to calculate — that finally brought down the Soviet Union, rather than any vague military threat from the West.

The collectivist mindset that Eric Hoffer so cogently analyzed is increasingly being echoed today, presenting another threat to freedom. But no amount of power to coerce others can make a life meaningful for good. As Hoffer realized, only freedom can provide that opportunity. It does not guarantee a meaningful life; only the possibility. But to create or preserve that possibility, we need to bolster freedom.