Everybody wants the world to be a better place. We often feel helpless, assuming that what happens is outside of our ability to make a difference. I don’t buy that defeatist attitude.

As we note this awful moment in history, let us remember that such awful moments are too numerous to ever count, as are their victims.

After more than five decades on the throne, Emperor Han Wudi publicly apologized to all of China for his rampant spending and reckless wars.

Much of the telegraph’s success can be attributed to the fact that government officials failed to recognize its potential, paving the way for entrepreneurs.

Government ought to be small enough that you have to go look for it, rather than it always looking for you.

His more unsavory side included close ties to the KKK and support for a federal Department of Education, half a century before we were cursed with one when President Jimmy Carter created it.

If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favorite uncle or your sweet grandmother. It just might cloak itself in grandiloquent platitudes like “equality,” “social justice,” and the “common good.”

How will we know if the evil that power promotes is lurking in our midst? What will it say beneath its mask? I’ll venture this: It will say things like “Pack the Court!” It will seek to silence dissenting opinions. To sow chaos and confusion, it will redefine nature itself, or assault any longstanding custom or principle that stands in its way. It will lure us with false promises.

Keep this list in a prominent place as a reminder to do what you can on freedom’s behalf every single day.

We cannot restore civil society if we have no confidence in ourselves and think that government has a monopoly on compassion. We’ll never get there if we tax away nearly half of people’s earnings and then, like children who never learned their arithmetic, complain that people can’t afford to meet certain needs.

A society without entrepreneurs is a society of stagnation and decline, of monotony and impoverishment, of bureaucrats and paperwork.

A Good Samaritan takes charge of a bad situation, improves it as best he can, and prevents further harm. That is exactly what Elisjsha Dicken did in Greenwood. This article is also available at The Stream via https://stream.org/yes-elisjsha-dicken-is-a-good-samaritan-and-he-deserves-a-medal/.

He knew America didn’t invent slavery. He understood that while some Americans enslaved his parents, other Americans helped free them.

The Abuse of Money, Part 2. Progressives criticize entrepreneurship and free markets as “all about money.” They pretend to be representatives of a higher calling which, it turns out, is even more about money than what they oppose. Part 1 of this essay is here: https://informeorwell.com/opinion/the-abuse-of-money-part-1/.

More than two millennia ago, Chinese scholars identified freedom and limited government as elements of virtue. They knew that huge, overbearing government was an enemy of virtue itself.

One of the enduring fallacies about money is that it must be a duty of the government to provide it (despite government’s sorry track record). We will never be free of destructive inflations or deflations until we toss that bit of flim-flam into the bonfire.

“Act worthy of yourselves,” advised this great American patriot.

The founders of ancient but enduring Chinese philosophies would be horrified to know that a Chinese leader starved and slaughtered 65 million of his countrymen to impose a system cooked up by a degenerate German scribbler named Karl Marx.

Sometimes Evil is manifested in an act so horrible no one can excuse it, such as a school shooting. Then Evil goes to work to get people to ignore real causes and support fake solutions, like disarming the innocent.

In this June 17, 2022 interview by Keith Knight of the Libertarian Institute, we discussed a wide variety of topics from the Great Depression to the nature of profit to the virtues of entrepreneurship to the evils of the welfare state.