This is why Republicans have actually added more to the national debt than Democrats have. We want to increase military spending, increase infrastructure spending, and keep welfare spending the same (apparently) but reduce the government's revenue. If that's what you plan to do, then there's only one way to fund it: more debt. In other words, young people today and people yet to be born are having their futures mortgaged.  This is IMMORAL, even if it means we save 4% on our tax bills, personally.

After all of this new debt is accumulated, what will happen? Well, our rates will go right back up again. We'll be back where we started, only with a lot more debt. What, then, did we really accomplish for individuals? In all likelihood, we've hurt them over the long term for one reason. Mark my words: Our debt load is so large and growing so quickly, that bickering over the temporary nature of tax cuts will one day seem to be a luxury. Unless we get our fiscal house in order, we are only borrowing from people's futures. A day is coming when our tax rates will have to be RAISED in order to keep our government solvent. Eventually our debt will impose realities like that. This is what we are setting ourselves up for.

The Republicans like to think that their tax cuts generate enough new growth to pay for themselves. The reality, of course, is that they don't. Even the most politically conservative analysis supports me on this.

They do cause some additional growth, but they don't cause enough to fully pay for cuts, and they never have. Not a single tax cut package has ever fully paid for itself with new growth. That's why you must cut spending. Cutting spending is how you make the equation balance. We tell ourselves that our tax cuts mean that we don't have to cut spending because the lower tax rates will generate enough new growth to pay for themselves. This is only a psychological need: We tell ourselves this so that we feel better about the long-term problems we know that our debt accumulation will cause. We want to believe it. The problem is that it simply isn't true. (On a side note, we're likely to experience even less growth from this tax bill now than we would have a couple of decades ago when we first started talking about it because our labor force is now shrinking. Regardless of tax rates, there's only so much new growth that can be generated from a shrinking labor force. We don't have enough babies and now also discourage immigration. There isn't a third way to grow a population or a labor force over the long term.)
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Anyway, I said that I'd end on a positive note, and I will. The new national security strategy that Trump announced yesterday is tremendous. It places additional emphasis on jihadist networks, as well it should. It shines a spotlight evermore directly at North Korea, as well it should.

The most important aspect is this though: It labeled China a "strategic competitor." You can bet that that is absolutely true. China is not a friend of the United States or of the global trade and sovereignty rules whereby the U.S.-led system operates. China sees themselves very much in competition with the U.S., and it's time we stepped up to the plate. China plays on a market field that has no foul lines. It's time for us to level that playing field.

While many Americans are complaining about Mexico's impact on our economy (which, contrary to much of what is shared on Facebook, actually provides an enormous boost to our economy), China steals our long-term prosperity. When it comes to engaging with the rest of the world, China looks out for China first. Thus, when it comes to engaging China, we should look out for ourselves first.

Sometimes diplomacy is called for, but most of the time you need to call something what it is. The era of holding China's hand and pretending that they're are our friend must end. China is a competitor that plays by its own rules at the expense of Americans' economic interests, and it's time for us to meet that challenge head on.

I applaud Trump for making this change. It's time. Let's gear up and fight for our long-term economic wellbeing.

Do you trust "The Government" or "The Market" more?
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I have no doubt that Comcast and other large Internet Service Providers do not have MY personal best interests in mind. Not exactly.

They have this thing called 'profit motive'.

But in a Free Market, if they continue to screw someone over or charge too high of prices, people will stop using their services and it’s an opportunity for another business to undercut them. They go out of business if they can’t offer the best product at the cheapest prices, because someone else will. Because "Profit Motive".
There are entire YELP-like industries designed around measuring how well companies
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Do you trust "The Government" or "The Market" more?
This is the only question you need ask yourself.

Let's discuss all these atrocities they are saying 'could occur'.... Why haven't we seen them from 1994-2014, twenty years with NO NET NEUTRALITY at all, and none of these horrors occurred.
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Sure some companies had some fights and guess what they all solved it and moved on. It never affected you for a moment, you didn't even know it happened until the TV or the great Facebook told you about it.

More than two decades to evolve free of regulation, that is why.
Some are too young, you don't remember how regulation has always been the problem and never once been the solution. When phones were highly regulated, great screams poured out when deregulation was proposed. They said it would be 'suicide for our communication networks and capabilities'.
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"The corporations will charge you for every feature", "Long distance will triple!", "They will shut your phone off if you say something they don't like!", "they will tap your phone", on and on it went....any of this sound familiar?
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I’m talking about back in the good old days when it was highly regulated?
Here are some facts about that time...
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1. You could not own a phone you had to rent it!
2. You could not unplug a phone and move it, they said you could damage the system or kill yourself because you were untrained (YES REALLY, similar to why ‘trained attendants' have to pump my gas for me when I drive through New Jersey). They would plug your phone in and staple the jack in. If you wanted to move your phone you had to pay to have a tech come move it to a new jack.
3. If you wanted a second phone in your house again you had to pay a phone tech to come install it. Over $100 (in 1980 dollars) to plug in a phone! Yes, seriously!
4. Long distance was over 1 dollar a minute; “in-state long distance” was higher.

But “oh please, please almighty government that has screwed up EVERYTHING else it has ever touched, come regulate the internet just a little bit.”
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It actually amounts to one thing "government regulation of the internet", every time you hear or read the term “net neutrality”, translate it in your head to read"government regulation of the internet" and see how much support you have for it in a week or two. Go check out these and other chunks of wisdom at The Survival Podcast.
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First research this: Why aren't there competing ISPs where you live? Does your local ISP have a monopoly that was granted to them from government regulation? Or does the cost of internet infrastructure truly outweigh the population in an area?
If there is no incentive to bring a second company into such a small population, chock that up to your 'cost of living in the boonies."

​The argument that "Cheap Abundant Internet is a Right because everything we do is online" will be withheld for another time (it's not).

There are never really any true monopolies, even Standard Oil would see competitors the moment they increased prices.

The ‘out in the boonies’ problem you have can probably only be fixed with a US Postal Service-style monopoly. But then you’d be getting USPS Government quality Internet.

The problem we have in this case (geographically, only one provider) is the kind of problem that the market corrects for, over time, though. It spurs the next innovation that will reduce the cost of DSL/Satellite solutions which will free us of the old physical fiber lines.

Just think, the 'telephone poles' we are so accustomed to seeing in our neighborhoods are 99% obsolete for telephone connectivity these days. Who has telephones in their house anymore?

Let the market innovate out of your problem. Yes, I know that means it sucks in the meantime.
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If the internet would be SO AWFUL without net neutrality why was it awesome from 1994-2014 when we had nothing even approaching "net neutrality" for those 20 years?

If it’s meant to help ‘the little guy’ compete with large media, then why is large media lobbying to get it passed?

Could it possibly be that large media LOVES legislation that they can lobby for that helps them and hurts others?

Could it be that large media firms can afford the teams of lawyers needed to comply with large regulation, knowing that the startup “little guy” can’t?
Most people who hate big business these days don’t even understand that these big businesses have politicians in their pockets in order to protect their market share and protect them from the ‘little guy’ who can innovate to make things better and cheaper for us.

Just think, if government started regulating the net in 1994, you'd still hear modem noises followed by "YOU'VE GOT MAIL" every time you logged on 23 years later!
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Thanks Free Market!
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Chapter 26 and 27

In these chapters he does still more debunking of the Lincoln mythology. I did notice though that he doesn't claim that the War of Northern Aggression was an unmitigated evil - just mostly evil with terrible consequences, but he does acknowledge that the abolition of slavery was the one positive outcome of the war.

He also discusses how American government is both fascist and socialist.

Chapter 30 – 33

These chapters are all about the evils of central banking.

I agree completely and have nothing to add except that coincidentally yesterday, before reading chapter 30, I used a very similar article by DiLorenzo to counter a commenter on this post who was saying that all economists think the Fed is great and that basically Ron is a crank.

That post and Brion's book should be of interest to anyone who liked that chapter.

Ch 32 reminded me of this meme.
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Chapter 34

This chapter debunks the notion that the Federal Reserve is in any way libertarian just because Alan Greenspan was head of it once.

Chapter 35

Debunks the myth that the Fed is in any way independent - Fed chairmen basically do the bidding of the president in order to maintain their jobs. President wants loose policy? President gets loose policy, and vice versa.

I liked his discussion on the damage done by typical college economics textbooks, particularly Paul Samuelson's, which is most popular.

Chapter 36

Explains how government caused the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.
This is useful because people often try to blame DE-regulation when nothing could be further from the truth.

As an aside, I found The Big Short an entertaining movie on the subject if you have not seen it, but it largely leaves unmentioned government as a cause and this chapter definitely fills in the blanks.

Section 5
Chapter 47

Macroeconomists Discover Economics and Debunk the New Deal (Again) is probably the most intriguing to me. Seven decades of economists who have sold us the line that the New Deal and large-scale government spending is what got us out of the Great Depression.
It took several decades but macroeconomic model builders, who consider themselves to be the elite of the economics profession, have finally discovered freshman-level principles of economics and have used that discovery to finally debunk FDR’s New Deal. (Beginning in the 1930s Austrian School economists like Henry Hazlitt recognized the truth about the New Deal: It made the Great Depression deeper and longer lasting.)

The only wise thing to have done was to have allowed the liquidation of hundreds of overcapitalized businesses to occur, cut taxes and spending, and deregulate. Instead, the Fed increased the money supply by 100 percent in a failed attempt to create another bubble while the president and Congress implemented an explosion of government interventionism. That was the

first time in American history that a depression was responded to with government interventionism rather than governmental retrenchment, and the result was a seventeen-year long Great Depression, the worst in history.

The essay is solid and I'll need to look into Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression to learn more.

That mainstream macroeconomists and their modeling have come around against governmental interventionism during a depression is great. Now, if the citizenry can learn that before the next bubble pops. I foresee politicians and special interests will use the next crisis as an opportunity to line their pockets.

CHAPTER 48

Will Socialism Make You Happier? The Trojan Horse of “Happiness Research”I hadn't heard of this statist argument before but basically
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"...statists around the world are changing their tune and saying that prosperity doesn’t really matter after all; what matters is how happy we are. And, they say, that is what government can be really, really good at—making us happy. Consequently, they argue, there should be no more limits on governmental powers, for limiting governmental powers will limit our very happiness."

In the year this book was published, Bhutan was the 'Happiest' according to the UN-sponsored "World Happiness Report". Yes, Bhutan. This hellhole, ahem, I mean paradise:

As an intelligence officer which has experience in this part of the world... No.

This year's winner is Norway, which is much more beautiful and bearable.Source:WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT 2017 It's also a lot more socialist, which to be fair, is the point. It's edited by leftist academic Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, what else would you expect?

As F.A. Hayek commented in The Road to Serfdom, the end of socialism was always egalitarianism; only the means changed over time, beginning with government ownership of the means of production and transforming to income redistribution through a welfare state and a “progressive” income tax.

These happiness researchers never make any mention at all of the well documented pathologies created by welfare statism, such as the destruction of the work ethic, family breakup, the growth of dysfunctionality caused by a welfare state that removes people from the working population, etc.

Thus, “happiness research” is part of a crusade to persuade the public that poverty and servitude to the state are superior to prosperity and freedom. It is a new version of what twentieth-century communists referred to as “socialism with a smiling face” during the last, dying days of totalitarian communism.

Chapter 49

The Canard of “Asymmetric Information” as a Source of Market FailureGood information on the Nirvana Theory of Markets. I tried to look more into it, but it is unique to only this writing.

Nirvana Fallacy— comparing real-world markets to an unattainable utopian ideal (perfect competition), and then denouncing markets because they fall short of utopia or Nirvana. Having “proven” that markets “fail,” the analyst then proposes government intervention under the assumption that no such failures will infect government. Markets may not be perfect, but government is assumed to be.

Overall, I liked Section 5 the best. The ease at which he demystifies economic myths is extremely understandable. I just wish it was taken onboard by many voters who refuse to heed the empirical evidence against government intervention.

Asymmetric information problem really applies to government not the free market:

“In this case we are dealing with the well-established fact that, in their capacity as voters, people tend to be “rationally ignorant” of almost all of what government does. In fact, government is so pervasive that no human mind could possibly comprehend the tiniest fraction of one percent of what government in a country the size of the U.S. does. Consequently, special-interest groups dominate all democratic governments;”

A related problem I think is that "public servants" are allowed to keep secrets from their supposed masters.

Chapter 51

“Politicians perpetuate the myth of government job creation because the government jobs that are created are seen by the average voter, whereas the private-sector jobs that are destroyed (or never created) are not.”

I.e. Hazlitt's seen and unseen as described in Economics in One Lesson

Chapter 52

DiLorenzo shoots down the gender wage gap myth. Tom Woods has done a couple of shows on this subject as well, as I recall.
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Summary

DiLorenzo lays out a decent criticism of how Government, corrupted by size and motive, has engaged in forceful and deceitful acts against the populace.
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To be honest, I really dislike collections of articles such as this and found in other "books". If an author is still alive, such collections are always better to be formed in to a true book that is able to cleanly explain a subject from start to finish. While DiLorenzo's articles are well written (and are quite often sourced with citations! Such a rarity among articles), the execution of the message would have been much better had he taken the time to write these out in to full chapters of their own.

The topics covered in the book were good ones to discuss (though I think that the mentions of the Civil war would be better served in a separate book), but I do wish that the author had expanded more on the topics of taxation, subsidies, and the enforcement of victimless crimes.
Overall a good read, and some articles were absolutely fantastic. If only the author could have written this out as an actual book and added another hundred pages or so, this could have been something especially fantastic.

edit: I've decided to give the book 5 stars, from the original 4. I find that I often go back to the book to re-read certain articles when I come across various topics of discussion. I still wish that the author had written a proper book instead of just compiling a collection of his articles, though.