At times I am amazed that the general public hasn’t rounded up all of us economists and thrown us over Niagara Falls. Forget complicated and technical issues like the business cycle — we economists can’t even agree on whether Social Security is broke.

Virtually everything people do carries risks. Certainly every form of production does so. All manufacturing processes are risky — as a young man I worked in a factory where I saw a man’s hand ground to pulp when it was caught between two large gears of a machine. All farming activities are risky — as a young man I worked on a farm where a man was crushed to death by a tractor that lurched forward while he was underneath it doing repairs and another was killed when a tractor he was operating on the side of a ditch tipped over, throwing him off and crushing him beneath its weight. All transportation is risky — thousands die in traffic accidents each year in this country. All of these things are heartbreaking. Yet, for good reason, we do not imagine that we would be better off if we forbade manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation.

The Deepwater Horizon accident that continues to foul the Gulf’s waters and shores was an unlikely but extremely destructive event. The damage it is causing is heartbreaking. But forbidding oil drilling in the Gulf would also cause immense damage, not least to the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people whose incomes are tied to that activity, not to mention all those who value the products made from the oil extracted from pools beneath the ocean floor. We can’t have all good things and no bad things. In life as it actually exists, we must choose and make trade-offs.

This recent video from Dan Mitchell at the Cato Institute deals with a very serious issue: the level of government spending and the impact on economic growth. I don’t think I’ve dealt with this enough, although it is implied in much of my work. In this video, Dan discusses the Rahn Curve, which says that the greater the government spends, the more it inhibits economic growth. This is almost intuitive in the sense that if you take money out of the private sector, the government is much less efficient at producing its intended outcomes than is the private sector. We need to ask what the private sector would have done with the money the government took from us through taxation. The liberal policy makers never understand that a lighter government footprint creates economic growth and provides more tax money for them.

And we are launching Big Peace on the 4th of July to celebrate the ideas of freedom and liberty, which are embraced by so many others around the world. The word “peace” has been hijacked by those who don’t believe in peace, but rather believe in appeasement. We intend to take it back. Peace comes from strength. Peace comes from freedom. More people were killed in the 20th century by their own governments than due to any war. Peace is a word devoid of meaning unless it includes liberty.

I think that the most important phenomenon of our times is that we are living in a Hayekian moment. The specialization, flow, and spread of knowledge are taking place at a breathtaking pace. Large organizations, both public and private, are relatively less well adapted to this environment. The response on the left has been to ignore the implications of the decentralization of knowledge. Instead, they are regressing to some 1930’s Progressive fantasy, in which the answer to every problem is to give wise technocrats the authority of government power. The denizens of the Ruling Class cling tightly to the ideology that keeps them in power