Society

To achieve maximum employment, the government must allow the market to take its course. The hunger, ambition and energy of individuals will lead them to employment and the education they need to obtain it. Anything government does to ‘help’ will only increase...

The motor vehicle is the ultimate tool of the individual. In it we go about our business traveling where and when we see fit. When Malthusian socialists say the automobile ‘encourages urban sprawl’, what they mean is that it encourages the growth of suburbs where...

When a portion of wealth is transferred from the person who owns it without his consent and without compensation, and whether by force or by fraud—to anyone who does not own it, then I say that property is violated; that an act of plunder is committed. —Frédéric...

The duty of parents to children Under the natural law parents owe a duty to their children to nurture, raise and educate them, and bring them healthy, happy, well-loved and well-balanced into adulthood. This applies to biological parents and adoptive parents. It...

It is the exercise of responsibility which teaches self-discipline. But in the early stages of life it is the experience of authority, when exerted fairly and consistently by adults, which teaches young people how to exercise responsibility themselves. We have to...

Chronic poverty is caused by a series of factors that cannot be solved by welfare or public housing. These include: Welfare Welfare is the leading cause of poverty. It operates by trapping people in a life of dependency from which they cannot spur themselves to...

Welfare is immoral Every man must bear his own privations rather than take what belongs to another. —Cicero. On Duties, 44 BC. It is immoral for the welfare recipient to take what he has not earned and therefore what does not belong to him. This is because the money...

The care therefore of every man’s soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself. But what if he neglect the care of his soul? I answer, what if he neglects the care of his health, or of his estate, which things are nearer related to the government of the...

Men … paying easy or no taxes, not molested with wars, must vastly increase by natural generation. —John Trenchard. Cato’s Letters No. 106, Of plantations and colonies, Saturday, December 8, 1722. Low taxes, effective guards against the scourge of war, and making...

Thomas Malthus was a mentally-ill individual who had a phobia against human happiness and progress. As a symptom of his disease, and in order to trick his fellow man into self-destruction, in 1798 he wrote Essay on the Principle of Population. In it he predicted that...

People with other faiths and cultures have always been welcomed in our land, assured of equality under the law, of proper respect and of open friendship. There is absolutely nothing incompatible between this and our desire to maintain the essence of our own identity....

Large council estates bring together people who are out of work but enjoy security of tenure at subsidized rents. They not only have every incentive to stay where they are: they mutually reinforce each other’s passivity and undermine each other’s initiative. Thus a...

Publicly provided healthcare is wrong If it is really the duty of the state to take care of the public health, it is surely bound to adopt the most efficient means of fulfilling that duty. Why not then act upon the old adage, that “prevention is better than cure,”...

There is a base level of education to which society is justified in requiring children to be educated. This is justified by the need to: Protect society as a whole from an uneducated mob; Protect society from ignorant individuals; Protect children from neglect. The...

Public education degenerates into an indoctrination tool Children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics—whatever that may be. Children who need to be able to express themselves in clear English are being taught political...

There is nothing unique about education that distinguishes it from the many other human needs which are filled by private enterprise. If, for many years, the government had undertaken to provide all the citizens with shoes (on the grounds that shoes are an urgent...

The rights of parents and the rights of family take precedence over those of Washington-based bureaucrats and social engineers. —Ronald Reagan. Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983. One of the greatest evils the state can...

As each individual relies upon the helpful vigilance of the state, he learns to abandon to its responsibility the fate and wellbeing of his fellow-citizens. But the inevitable tendency of such abandonment is to deaden the living force of sympathy, and to render the...

The net effect of allowing charitable and religious organizations to escape paying taxes that everyone else pays is the same as if those organizations were subsidized directly from the treasury. In the end, everyone else must pay more taxes to make up the forgone...

We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of public money. —David Crockett. Quoted in “Not Yours to Give,” by Edward S. Ellis, 1884. Charity reflects an...

Border security is vital for preventing criminals, drugs, and illegal immigrants entering a country. The porous border with Mexico has exposed the United States to floods of migrants who threaten to overwhelm its ability to absorb them into its law-abiding culture....

The agricultural population would become more and more a sort of appendage to a national park, quaint folk preserved to people the scenery, and deliberately prevented from making the mental and technological adjustments that would enable them to be self-supporting....

In America, such affirmative action programmes have not only become a heavy burden on employers of all kinds; by increasing the resentment of the majority against minorities they have precisely the opposite effect to that intended. —Margaret Thatcher. The Fourth...

The savages of America, like other men, have their predominant passions. They esteem war and hunting as almost the only pursuits worthy of a man … these constitute their highest point of honor, while every other labor of life is imposed on the women, who are no better...