re: The Buffalo killer was…wait for it….A LIBERAL!!!!

quote:

---

What we have is a hampered market economy that is growing ever more hampered by ever more government intervention, and that is characterized by a growing loss of individual freedom. The growth of the government's economic intervention is synonymous with a loss of individual freedom because it means increasingly initiating the use of physical force to make people do what they do not voluntarily choose to do or prevent them from doing what they do voluntarily choose to do.
Since the individual is the best judge of his own interests, and at least as a rule seeks to do what it is in his interest to do and to avoid doing what harms his interest, it follows that the greater the extent of government intervention, the greater the extent to which individuals are prevented from doing what benefits them and are instead compelled to do what causes them loss.
Today, in the United States, government spending, federal, state, and local, amounts to almost half of the monetary incomes of the portion of the citizenry that does not work for the government. Fifteen federal cabinet departments, and a much larger number of federal regulatory agencies, together, in most instances with counterparts at the state and local level, routinely intrude into virtually every area of the individual citizen's life. In countless ways he is taxed, compelled, and prohibited.

---

quote:

---

The effect of such massive government interference is unemployment, rising prices, falling real wages, a need to work longer and harder, and growing economic insecurity. The further effect is growing anger and resentment.
Though the government's policy of interventionism is their logical target, the anger and resentment people feel are typically directed at businessmen and the rich instead. This is a mistake which is fueled for the most part by an ignorant and envious intellectual establishment and media.
And in conformity with this attitude, since the collapse of the stock market bubble, which was in fact created by the Federal Reserve's policy of credit expansion and then pricked by its temporary abandonment of that policy, government prosecutors have adopted what appears to be a particularly vengeful policy toward executives guilty of financial dishonesty, as though their actions were responsible for the widespread losses resulting from the collapse of the bubble. Thus the former head of a major telecommunications company was recently given a twenty-five year prison sentence. Other top executives have suffered similarly.
Even more ominously, the government's power to obtain mere criminal indictments has become equivalent to the power to destroy a firm, as occurred in the case of Arthur Andersen, the major accounting firm. The threatened use of this power was then sufficient to force major insurance brokerage firms in the United States to change their managements to the satisfaction of New York State's Attorney General. There is no way to describe such developments other than as conviction and punishment without trial and as extortion by the government. These are major steps along a very dangerous path.

---

quote:

---

Fortunately, there is still sufficient freedom in the United States to undo all the damage that has been done. There is first of all the freedom to publicly name it and denounce it.
More fundamentally, there is the freedom to analyze and refute the ideas that underlie the destructive policies that have been adopted or that may be adopted. And that is what is critical. For the fundamental factor underlying interventionism and, of course, socialism as well, whether Nazi or Communist, is nothing but wrong ideas, above all, wrong ideas about economics and philosophy.
There is now an extensive and growing body of literature that presents sound ideas in these two vital fields. In my judgment, the two most important authors of this literature are Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. An extensive knowledge of their writings is an indispensable prerequisite for success in the defense of individual freedom and the free market.

---