This is an important question, and it has several facets, each of which is worthy of reflection. For the moment I’d like to focus on whether this is a Christian nation in the sense that it is supposed to be one, or at least was one in the beginning. In this context,...
Policies
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Six
6. Increase retirement ages and contributions for Social Security over the next five years so that the program is “fixed” for the foreseeable future, and no longer a source for political debate.
Obedience to the Unenforceable
In our friend Fitz Allison’s insightful new book, Truth in an Age of Arrogance, I found a quote by someone I’d never heard of, Lord John Fletcher Moulton. I looked him up; he was a brilliant English mathematician and jurist at the beginning of the last century. The...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Five
5. Instead of “Cap and Trade”, in 2011 add a ten cent federal tax to each gallon of refined gasoline, and then increase that tax by five cents every year for the next twenty years. Use the funds to do energy research, to provide seed capital for viable alternatives,...
How Public Policy Can Affect Almost Everything
For those of you who have studied F. A. Hayek for years, my recent epiphany (see earlier post) must seem almost laughable. Like a music historian who, after forty years in the field, suddenly discovers Tchaikovsky. Though written almost seventy years ago, The Road to...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Four
4. For 2011, every branch and department of government at every level, except Defense, will have to get by on ten percent less income, including salaries. Let the government’s skilled managers decide how to accomplish this reduction in each department at every level;...
Russians and Sources
I have a different take on Russia and Russians than you might hear otherwise, and this experience leads me to a small suggestion which I often share with our children. Russians tend to be independent and entrepreneurial; they believe in faith, family, education,...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps : Step Three
3. Secure the southern border within six months. Start by using significant manpower, and then reduce the numbers as the fence is completed and technology is added. Create a way for those who are here illegally to have a path to citizenship which has real costs for...
Advice to current Economic Policy Makers: Take a Hayek
Where has F.A. Hayek been all my life? Thanks to our sons, I'm reading The Road to Serfdom, written by Hayek when he was at the LSE in 1944. Hundreds of thousands of copies have been read since then, but even though I was an Econ major in 1968, somehow I missed his...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps : Step Two
2. Above a floor of minimum untaxed income, set the personal income tax at 19% for families with children. The rate for singles and couples without children will be slightly higher. The tax will be the same on all forms of income, with no deductions for mortgages,...
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