Paradocracy

On the night of November 15, 2024, boxing fans from around the globe had their eyes set on a long-awaited match featuring one of the all-time greatest boxers and one of the biggest names in sports: Mike Tyson. Known as “Iron Mike” and “The Baddest Man on the Planet”, Tyson is the youngest boxer ever to win a heavyweight title, but that was thirty-eight years ago, November 22nd, 1986, when Tyson was all of twenty years old. As for the fifteenth of November, 2024, Iron Mike, now all of fifty-eight years, was scheduled to go toe-to-toe with “YouTube sensation” Jake Paul, 27, who’s made a “career” out of reckless antics and childish online videos and, as far as professional boxing goes, coaxing old fighters to come out of retirement.  Despite all of the hype and anticipation in the lead-up to the match, one between old school and new school, one buoyed by nostalgia, conjuring up memories of a bygone era in sports, and capturing the imaginations of the many who witnessed Tyson in h...

As of this hour, former President and now President-elect Donald Trump has secured his second term as the forty-seventh President of the United States. Trump’s victory comes after winning key battleground states Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.  As for the popular vote, Trump was victorious there as well, winning by a two-percent margin. Despite these results, it’s evident that there remains a significant social and political problem in the United States, where politically-motivated violence, social unrest, crime and general instability have become rampant over the years since the death of George Floyd.  However, I’d say the fact that it was even this close is ominous for the years ahead. This was as clear as it gets for an election, that the clear and obvious choice (considering the lackluster alternatives outside of the two major parties and the dropping out of a key contender, Robert Kennedy, Jr.) was Donald Trump, the candidate championing t...

The nightmare, the hammers, the sickles ahead, The future is bleak, it is black, it is red The history of horror, the miseries ones fled Hosting fresh Histories, deciding what’s said The practice, the shortages, the scarcity of bread The masters, the deciders, they decide what is fed The death, the despair, the piles of dead The records, the mysteries of those who have bled The judges, the masters pick who fights in their stead No sacrifice, no compassion for those who have fled They hold the future in charge of what’s read They spare the truth, no need, not a shred No care for the people, not Sally, not Ned They hardly hesitate to do away with the head No more individuals, debate put to bed Prioritizing one thing, their crates full of lead Acronyms galore, ‘A’ through to zed Some friendly, familiar, names such as FRED It’s treachery, it’s over the cliff on a sled It’s sleeping in slums, no homes but a shed  Subjecting the people to wars of great dread The future, the truth, their ...

The weight of big government ultimately becomes so unbearable that even the most battle-hardened warriors come to fear it over death itself.  As Pvt. David Kenyon Webster described his time in the U. S. Army during World War II, they are “more afraid of defying the authority of an officer, backed up by the whole Army and a court-martial composed of officers like him, than we are of death by shell fire.”  He continued: “Discipline is fear, not leadership, and we are afraid — not of [the officer] but of the irresistible force that he represents. Afraid for our lives, we are more afraid of the system that holds us in thrall, and so we lie here and wait to be killed, because an officer tells us to lie here.”  This is the state of the soldier “in thrall” as it is the state of things under the weight of any massive bureaucracy or tyranny of any kind.

In the case for liberty, there is certainly some tolerance for error or failure, as it is generally suffered by the individual and not brought upon anyone by design . Wherever anyone seeks to empower government, however, one must be reasonably certain of the designs, the logic and the costs, and he must be equally honest about the unknowns as with the foreseeable consequences; after all, there is no margin for error where those designs are administered by the barrel of a gun.  One must necessarily remember that government is a monopoly on force and coercion, that force and coercion serve together as the modifying distinction between government and enterprise. It is a kind of force and coercion not by spirit or intention of written law but in accordance with the letter and understanding of the enforcers in their own time, in their own limited judgment and impaired conscience. As opposed to a state of liberty, where mistakes, failures and crimes are unavoidable in the face of human f...

There is much confusion around the relationship between rising prices and employment, and this is only exacerbated by the rhetoricians in government and elsewhere. This is the confused notion that rising prices and the labor market carry a positive relationship, that rising prices are generally positively correlated with lower unemployment. In economics, there is a drawn correlation between inflation and employment, illustrated by what is known as the Phillips curve. The graphic is used to argue that employment and inflation are positively correlated. The failure of this interpretation, however, is that the lower unemployment figures fail to capture the real improvement of the marginal productivity of labor and the overall standard of living enjoyed by those economic agents. It is the responsibility of any shrewd surveyor to distill all of the available data in order to determine the true qualitative relationship between those sets and what they actually mean. This is where the quality...