It’s quite interesting indeed when both progressives and conservatives seem to be nostalgic for those good ol’ days in the 1950s, for different reasons, of course. Conservatives want to go back to the nuclear Leave It to Beaver family and what not while liberals like to talk about those 90-percent tax rates that we owe our prosperity to. Or something like that. We’ll focus on the latter for the time being. Bernie Sanders noted that “When radical, socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, I think the highest marginal tax rate was something like 90 percent.” Paul Krugman said the same … Continue reading

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There’s something very odd about the United States military that makes many of the most budget-hawkish fiscal conservatives turn into starry-eyed, big government welfare pushers. The hypocrisy is breathtaking; at the same time as many conservatives are talking about “America’s descent into socialism” they are pushing their own brand of military socialism to ever more absurd lengths. At a whopping $581 billion per year, the United States already spends more than the rest of the world combined on its military. However, even that number doesn’t represent the entire picture. As Robert Higgs has shown, when everything is included (from the … Continue reading

It’s been noticed more than a few times that there aren’t many substantive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. While this is true in many ways for the parties themselves, the Left and Right certainly differ on a range of issues from welfare to abortion to gay rights. What they have in common — at least the mainstream varieties — is a desire to use the state to shape society in whatever way they see fit. As Andrew Napolitano put it, “We have migrated from a two-party system into a one-party system, the big-government party. There’s a democratic wing that … Continue reading