self-esteem

a career of ruling over others

From the Ron Paul of local government:

Being a government employee, I love this paragraph:

Government employees would have to find jobs in private enterprise if they wanted to work. There are two major kinds of government employees — those whose services would be in demand in the free market (teachers, librarians, secretaries, firemen, etc.) and those who perform no useful function but simply keep the governmental machinery running (lawmakers, tax collectors, bureaucratic record keepers and paper shufflers, executives in the military-industrial complex, the President and the Vice President, etc.). The first kind would probably find only minor difficulties in adjusting to a free society. A forest ranger in Yellowstone National Park might find his job almost unchanged, as the Park was taken over by a private corporation to be run for profit. Those lawyers and judges whose minds were young and flexible enough to adjust to freedom instead of statutory law could sell their services to free enterprise arbitration agencies. On the other hand, men who had spent their lives as tax collectors for the Internal Revenue Service or as Federal narcotics agents would find no “demand” for their services and would have to change careers in order to survive — perhaps even to that of garbage collector or janitor (honorable work, for a change). In a sense, this would be a partial penalty for having been willing to make a career of ruling over others.

Source: The Market for Liberty by Linda and Morris Tannehill.

Have a good weekend!

Brian Drake
Libertarian Candidate for Texas House of Representatives – District 15

socialism can't calculator

socialism can’t calculator

18th-century English dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary. Thirteen Volumes. London, 1928, Reissued in Compact Edition, 1971. Volume 4 (E), p. 379, “Excise” 26.