When the Manhattan Institute added up the cost of the Democrats’ expansive agenda, the price tag totaled $42.5 trillion over 10 years, or roughly $4.2 trillion a year. And that’s likely a lowball estimate, since government programs almost always end up costing far more than advertised.
It is the entrepreneur who imagines the better future that consumers wish for, and, in the pursuit of profit, finds a way to deliver it by refreshing capital and putting it to new uses. No other system has this capability.
The proposed tax will apply to a wide range of streaming platforms. It is likely that both video and music streaming services will fall under the new digital goods and services tax. Services like Amazon’s video and music streaming platforms, Spotify, Pandora, and Apple will be included in the new tax.
The bureaucrats are not as incompetent as the politicians. They will get their man, or woman. They will extract their pound of flesh, plus a fine for late payment. They will spy and surveil, they will threaten and lie in court, they will prosecute and fine. They are now our rulers.
Today, when we see impoverished countries around the world struggling to prosper, we tend to focus on sending more and more dollars in aid. But history has shown us a powerful path out of poverty: market-creating innovation.
If the world is getting so much better, why does everyone seem so miserable? Perhaps because in the U.S., life is improving more slowly than in poorer countries, and in some places it is getting worse. Yet for most Americans, life is getting better: Median incomes are rising, average health is improving, and violent crime, divorce and teen pregnancy are all trending down.
The mayor says New York’s—and America’s—money is “in the wrong hands,” and his duty is to put it in the right ones. The right hands are presumably his own, by which he can pass that money out to those he and the City Council believe to be more deserving.
The new era of low transaction cost digital service provision is, in Munger’s telling, a revolution, as significant as the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. Each of us as consumers will have the opportunity to lead more convenient, more efficient, and safer lives.
Clearly, this situation closely parallels the current one in many ways, and a legion of writers have already shown that the present level of subsidies and regulations places a demoralizing, intolerable burden on the increasingly harassed productive sector of society. We must remember that we all depend on the output of private economic activity.
SJWs are always angry and almost never genuinely happy or content. There’s always something or someone out there who must be “resisted” in some way. Around such people, no trash can is safe from being picked up and hurled in a fit of anger if someone you don’t like is about to give a speech at the local university.
Fill out the form below to get the CFI Newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Leave us your contact information below to recieve a free copy of CFI's 10-Point Manifesto for Individualism
Join the CFI Mailing List using the form below to recieve a free Sample Chapter of Hunter Hastings' The Interconnected Individualism
Leave us your contact information below to recieve a free copy of Reliving We The Living
The Center for Individualism is a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization with a mission to promote Individualism in America. All work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than CFI. Learn More…