Can the Rampaging Leviathan Be Stopped or Slowed? (Bob Higgs)

Robert Higgs writes a terrific article on why educating the youth about liberty is ultimately the only way freedom will come about in this country, as they pick up the pieces when the increasingly bloated Leviathan finally implodes:

In a recent commentary titled “Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Political Economy,” I endeavored to show that an analytical understanding of past growth in the government’s size, scope, and power does not permit us to prescribe effective means of stopping or slowing this growth, particularly any simple “silver bullet” remedy, and I specifically disclaimed any personal knowledge of “what is to be done” toward this end. Responses to this commentary, some of them from keenly intelligent friends of mine who insist that diagnostics and therapeutics must be firmly linked, lead me to believe that I did not make myself sufficiently clear.

One respondent wrote, “Higgs must be speaking with tongue in cheek, for a man of his intellect simply must have a few solutions at least.” Well, yes, on one level, I have many “solutions” to propose. The problem comes when we ponder why I’ve just put quotation marks around the word solutions. The reason pertains to the links that connect my understanding of why government has grown with measures that might be taken to stop or slow its ongoing growth.

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