Louisiana’s school voucher program shows that vouchers increase rather than decrease government involvement in and destruction of education.

Michael A. LaFerrara reviews The Forgotten Depression—1921, by James Grant.

Barack Obama recently announced a plan to use taxpayer money to pay the full tuitions of community college students. This proposed program is immoral and destructive on several counts. To begin with, the program would violate the rights of taxpaying Americans who would be forced to fund the program.

New federal regulations intentionally target private, for-profit colleges. The government should not be involved in lending money to students at all. But so long as it is, and so long as it regulates these loans, it is morally obligated—and should be legally obligated—to treat all students and all educational institutions equally under the law.

Both Brittany Maynard and Christina Symanski bravely chose to decide for themselves the terms on which they would live and die—and both women bravely chose to make their decisions and struggles public in order to highlight the inhumanity of laws forbidding assisted suicide.

In a free market in education, with complete separation of government and schools, lawmakers would have no power to interfere in schools or to meddle with contracts between educators and parents.

The “rights” sought by the union are the “freedom” not to associate voluntarily, but to violate the rights of employers to run their businesses as they see fit and to enter into voluntary, mutually consensual contracts with employees. Specifically, the union wants to use the force of government to coerce business owners to “bargain” with unions.

The U.S. government’s “pay as you earn” program for financing college students’ education is immoral, as it forces taxpayers to subsidize student loans and to assume the financial risks of doing so. Fortunately, Lumni, a pioneering private college finance company, offers an inspiring example of how students can acquire college financing by strictly voluntary means.

What the left has pragmatically (and temporarily) “learned” about Americans on this count is consistent with polls that show a healthy majority of Americans still revere the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and value the individual’s inalienable right to pursue his personal goals, not the collective’s alleged “right” to throttle individual achievement for the so-called “common good.”

An increasing number of companies founded in the United States are leaving the country because of high corporate tax rates, and some Americans are blaming the businesses. But such critics, not the companies in question, are being unpatriotic—as judged by the standards of America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

[caption id="attachment_26356" align="alignright" width="300"] Image: Tesla Motors[/caption] Relying on so-called franchise laws, representatives of car dealerships in several states have been fighting with some success to legally stop Tesla Motors from selling its cars to consumers directly, rather than through franchised dealerships. As Fox news reports, Arizona, Maryland, New Jersey,…

Adults have a moral right to spend their money as they see fit, and gambling companies have a moral right to offer their services as they see fit. So long as those gambling or offering gambling services do not violate rights, government has no moral right to interfere.

Government funds its schools by forcibly confiscating wealth from individuals, in violation of their moral right to decide for themselves how to use their money. An inevitable consequence is that government seizes wealth from many people who do not benefit from or approve of the government schools they are forced to finance.

Legally mandated sick pay violates the moral rights of employers and employees to mutually agree to terms of employment. Government’s only proper role in this area is to protect the rights of employers and job seekers to contract voluntarily so that they can live their lives in accordance with their own judgment.

As ObamaCare extends to government more and more control over health care, Milton Wolf—a medical doctor and candidate for U.S. Senate from Kansas—advocates “free market solutions to our healthcare problems” through a package of reforms he calls PatientCare.