I thought I would throw out a variety of recent editorials from some of my favorite economists and public policy experts. Economist Robert P. Murphy isn’t featured today, because I wrote an entire post about his excellent article on energy policy recently.

Does the government discourage marriage and family?

Patrick Henry College economist Stephen Baskerville wrote an article about the government’s role decline of marriage and the family.

He writes:

…80 percent of divorces are unilateral. Under “no-fault,” divorce becomes a power grab by one spouse, assisted by judicial officials who profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers. Involuntary divorce involves government agents forcibly removing innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It requires long-term supervision over private life by state functionaries, including police and jails.

…Invariably the first action in a divorce is to separate the children from one parent, usually the father. Even if he is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and does not agree to the divorce, the state seizes his children with no burden of proof to justify why. The burden of proof–and financial burden–falls on him to demonstrate why they should be returned.

A legally unimpeachable parent can thus be arrested for seeing his own children without government authorization. He can be arrested through additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him. He can be arrested for domestic violence or child abuse, even without evidence that he has committed any. He can be arrested for not paying child support, regardless of the amount demanded. He can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or psychotherapist. There is no formal charge, no jury, no trial, and no record.

If these statements surprise you, I recommend you read the whole article to find out how this is done. You will never see anything like this reported in the mainstream media. They have an agenda that forbids telling the truth about this issue.

Do gun-free zones discourage multiple victim public shootings?

University of Maryland economist John R. Lott writes about gun-free zones and their effect on MVPS incidents in this Fox News article.

He writes:

Time after time multiple- victim public shootings occur in “gun free zones” — public places where citizens are not legally able to carry guns. The horrible attack today in Binghamton, New York is no different. Every multiple-victim public shooting that I have studied, where more than three people have been killed, has taken place where guns are banned.

You would think that it would be an important part of the news stories for a simple reason: Gun-free zones are a magnet for these attacks. Extensive discussions of these attacks can be found here and here. We want to keep people safe, but the problem is that it is the law-abiding good citizens, not the criminals, who obey these laws. We end up disarming the potential victims and not the criminals. Rather than making places safe for victims, we unintentionally make them safe for the criminal.

Lott is the author of “More Guns, Less Crime”, a study, published by University of Chicago Press, that shows how concealed-carry laws drastically reduce crime in every state in which these laws were enacted. Surprising? Take a second look.

Is moral equivalence good foreign policy?

Hoover Institute (Stanford University) economist Thomas Sowell writes about the danger of electing a president with no executive experience at any level. Especially one who believes, as Evan Sayet says, that evil is good, and good is evil.

Sowell writes about Obama’s affection for Iran and Russia:

What did his televised overture to the Iranians accomplish, except to reassure them that he was not going to do a damn thing to stop them from getting a nuclear bomb? It is a mistake that can go ringing down the corridors of history.

…This year, President Obama’s attempt to make a backdoor deal with the Russians, behind the backs of the NATO countries, was not only rejected but made public by the Russians– a sign of contempt and a warning to our allies not to put too much trust in the United States.

And his hostility for Israel and Britain:

However much Barack Obama has proclaimed his support for Israel, his first phone call as President of the United States was to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to whom he has given hundreds of millions of dollars, which can buy a lot of rockets to fire into Israel.

Our oldest and staunchest ally, Britain, has been downgraded by President Obama’s visibly less impressive reception of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, compared to the way that previous Presidents over the past two generations have received British Prime Ministers.

You can find a lot more about the kind of foreign policy threats we face at The Western Experience. The world is not a safe place, Bush just made it look that way by keeping our enemies in check, in exactly the way Obama won’t.

Is wealth redistribution morally justified?

Finally, let’s see what George Mason University economist Walter Williams has to say about the morality of wealth redistribution.

Excerpt:

The reason is that now that the U.S. Congress has established the principle that one American has a right to live at the expense of another American, it no longer pays to be moral. People who choose to be moral and refuse congressional handouts will find themselves losers. They’ll be paying higher and higher taxes to support increasing numbers of those paying lower and lower taxes. As it stands now, close to 50 percent of income earners have no federal income tax liability and as such, what do they care about rising income taxes? In other words, once legalized theft begins, it becomes too costly to remain moral and self-sufficient.

I recommend clicking on whichever of these stories strikes you as the most wrong or unfamiliar, and see if reading the whole thing changes your mind at all. I think it’s a fun experience to become more aware and tolerant of different views by learning about them. You can still disagree, but you’ll have more understanding.