Cosigning a loan for someone with shaky credit is a very risky activity; there’s not much evidence that it works better at the international level.

High liberals tend to think that social equality benefits the poor, even if the price of that equality is that the poor have a smaller bundle of materials goods than they might have had in a society that allowed more inequality. In part this is because they think the personal experience of political participation is more valuable to people than the personal experience of wealth and income.

Fair-minded individuals may differ on what is necessary to limit the inherent danger of government abuses; proposals run the gamut from strict constitutionalism to anarchy, but only the strongly deluded fail to recognize the risks that exist when one individual or group is given coercive power over the actions of another.

The government is saying, in effect, you may pay $7.25 an hour or more or you may pay 0 an hour but don’t let me catch you paying more than 0 and less than $7.25.

There are a multitude of reasons why government planning always fails. These reasons include, but are not limited to, the denial of consumer sovereignty, the ineptitude of central planners and their inability to account for the actions of millions of individuals living in different situations and responding to different incentives, and the willingness of policymakers to sacrifice honesty and prudence for expedience and power.

Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

It would be patently offensive and irrational for the President to block intrastate trade or to prohibit further technological advances until Congress agreed to fund workers allegedly displaced by that trade/mechanization, and it’s just as offensive and absurd for the White House to do it for international trade and TAA.

Harry Truman famously observed that the only thing new is history you don’t know.