Controls breed controls – part 1
Ayn Rand was an uncompromising defender of laissez-faire capitalism, which, she held, means “the abolition of any and all forms of government intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.” In her essay “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?”, she noted:
There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.
This view would shock most people today. They take it as self-evident that we must have some combination of freedom and government control of the economy. The idea that “just a few controls” would lead to “gradual enslavement” strikes them as dubious, to say the least. But the evidence for this proposition is all around us. A free country doesn’t dissolve into authoritarian rule over night, but by steps–some small and innocuous, others vast and brazen. Today, we’re seeing examples of both.
Here’s a recent example of the former: Read the rest of this entry »


A favorite cliché of coming-of-age movies is the irresponsible teenager taking the family car for a joyride without his parents’ permission. The climax is invariably a spectacular car-wreck, with the car totaled beyond repair. In such movies, the parents usually ground their children for the harm they have inflicted on the family by destroying its perfectly good car.
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