EDITORIAL Showing 501 - 550 of 1951
A Must Read This Summer for All Free-market Thinkers
July 18, 2014
Mark Tier's latest title, Trust Your Enemies: A Political Thriller, which I found to be an intensely compelling Libertarian ride, is his first foray into fiction, following upon his excellent nonfiction writing that I've enjoyed for years. Having known Mark for ...
Sanctions and Airliners
July 18, 2014
The unilateral US sanctions announced by Obama on July 16 blocking Russian weapons and energy companies access to US bank loans demonstrate Washington's impotence. The rest of the world, including America's two largest business organizations, turned their backs ...
Voluntaryist Anthropology
July 17, 2014
Libertarians believe a better world is possible. Libertarian anarchists believe the best world is a stateless one; it consists of voluntary societies which would include institutions or customs to prevent and deal with occasional crime. The practical applicatio ...
Is There a Right to Be Wrong?
July 16, 2014
That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values – indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values – is almost self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occas ...
Free Market Capitalism vs. Crony Capitalism
July 15, 2014
In the minds of many people around the world, including in the United States, the term "capitalism" carries the idea of unfairness, exploitation, undeserved privilege and power and immoral profit making. What is often difficult to get people to understand is th ...
What’s Missing in the Current Immigration ‘Crisis’ Debate
July 14, 2014
Over the past several weeks we have seen a significant increase in illegal immigration, as thousands of unaccompanied minors pour across what seems an invisible southern border into the United States. The mass immigration has, as to be expected, put an enormous ...
The Evolution of the Marijuana Marketplace
July 12, 2014
BusinessInsider tells us that "America's Drug Companies Are Bankrolling the Crusade Against Legal Weed." This article is actually a summary of a larger article in The Nation, and BusinessInsider presents it this way: "Last week, The Nation published an interest ...
The Deteriorating Economic Outlook
July 10, 2014
The third and final estimate (until the annual GDP revisions) of first quarter 2014 real GDP growth released June 25 by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis was a 2.9% contraction in GDP growth, a 5.5 percentage point difference from the January forecast of 2.6% ...
Fourth of July and the Public Interest
July 09, 2014
Throughout history political thinkers have been doing a lot of fretting about the public good (or public interest, common good, general welfare, etc.). Usually they came up with massive plans or enchanting visions. Plato's teacher, Socrates, was the great grand ...
Misguided Beliefs in Political Leaders
July 08, 2014
This is an election year and as in all past election years we are inundated with promises and proposals from candidates, each hoping to attract our votes. For the most part what they are promising is "leadership" and political solutions to our personal, social ...
Hobby Lobby Decision Creates Small Island of Freedom in Ocean of Statism
July 07, 2014
This week, supporters of religious freedom cheered the Supreme Court's ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. The Court was correct to protect business owners from being forced to violate their religious beliefs by paying for contraceptives. However, the decision was ...
French Revolution Meme Persists
July 05, 2014
In the past few months, we've examined articles and editorials that seem to align themselves with a neo-French Revolution meme, odd as that sounds. In fact, each article we've analyzed has presented an argument that income disparity is leading to increased viol ...
July 4th Militarist Bunkum (an encore by request)
July 04, 2014
Did you know that 85 to 90 percent of war's casualties are non-combatant civilians? That is the conclusion reached by a nine-person research team in the June 2014 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The deaths of soldiers who are fighting the war ar ...
Rejoinder: The Wisdom of Adam Smith for Our Own Times
July 04, 2014
Let us celebrate the 291st birthday of the great Scottish economist together and let us rehabilitate his Real Bills Doctrine! Richard Ebeling in the June 3rd issue of the Daily Bell under the same title contributed a much needed reminder of the relevance of Ada ...
The Power of the Powerless
July 03, 2014
In the sixth century BC, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu identified the world's biggest problem. Individuals viewed themselves as powerless. The burden of impotence made them resent others and fear life which, in turn, led them to seek power through controlling ...
Scientists and Morality
July 02, 2014
Natural scientists are pretty much committed to understanding the world without reference to morality since if what happens does so because of impersonal forces of nature, there would seem to be no room for consideration of right versus wrong, good versus ba ...
What Exactly Is 'Racism'?
July 02, 2014
I want to look at two words that the State and its hangers-on have employed with much success on behalf of increases in government power. One is racism. The other is equality. What exactly is "racism"? We almost never hear a definition. I doubt anyone really kn ...
A Declaration of Independence from Big Government
July 01, 2014
The Declaration of Independence, proclaimed by members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of the American experiment in free government. What is too often forgotten is that what the Founding Fathers argued against in the Decla ...
Celebrate Independence Day By Opposing Government Tyranny
June 30, 2014
This week Americans will enjoy Independence Day with family cookouts and fireworks. Flags will be displayed in abundance. Sadly, however, what should be a celebration of the courage of those who risked so much to oppose tyranny will instead be turned into a cel ...
An Unfortunate Politico Promotion?
June 28, 2014
An article in Politico magazine provides us with a relevant dominant social theme that reinforces the precarious position of the predatory one percent – as first presented by Occupy Wall Street. Is the OWS meme revving back up? Too bad. We enjoyed the relativ ...
Mechanisms of 'Correcting' Violence
June 26, 2014
Aggression will occur within every society because it occurs within human nature. Every society needs to have mechanisms of correction to address the inevitable violence – that is, theft, physical assault and the threat thereof. The State v. the Individual as ...
Progressive? No They Aren't!
June 25, 2014
At my university I was sitting at one of these interminable meetings where sadly much time is wasted and little gets done. But during one of the discussions the person who was the leader made the point that there are faculty members of different political persu ...
The Rebirth of Austrian Economics
June 24, 2014
Forty years ago, during the week of June 15-22, 1974, the Austrian School of Economics was reborn during a conference in the small New England town of South Royalton, Vermont. Why was this important? Because the economists of the Austrian School have developed ...
Opt-Out of Common Core, Opt-In to The Ron Paul Curriculum
June 23, 2014
Oklahoma recently took action to protect the state's children from the federal education bureaucracy by withdrawing from Common Core. Common Core is the latest attempt to bribe states, with money taken from the American people, into adopting a curriculum develo ...
Is War Part of a Wall Street Party?
June 21, 2014
The drums of war are beating, as Paul Craig Roberts pointed out in a recent, controversial column posted at The Daily Bell. Certainly, he has a point. In this article, I'll review his arguments in light of the continued evolution of military and political tensi ...
What Keynes Has Done To Us
June 20, 2014
The essential economic problem we confront today is that our dominant Keynesian intellectuals have abandoned reality. They do not grasp what they have wrought with the mountainous loads of debt and malinvestment that are overwhelming us. Much of this burden mus ...
Thoreau as a Lone Crazy
June 19, 2014
Murray Rothbard used the "lone crazy" theory to describe the individual who comes out of nowhere and dramatically alters the course of history; perhaps he assassinates a president. The lone crazy could also be an event, such as 9/11. Its essence is surprise, im ...
Right to Bear Arms
June 18, 2014
Arms are weapons with which to physically overpower others. There are justified and unjustified cases of overpowering others. Self-defense is clearly a case of the former. Aggressing upon another, robbing, murdering, raping, assaulting or kidnapping another wou ...
Washington Is Beating The War Drums
June 18, 2014
I wish I had only good news to bring to readers, or even one item of good news. Alas, goodness has ceased to be a feature of US policy and simply cannot be found in any words or deeds emanating from Washington or the capitals of its European vassal states. The ...
open road at sunset
Gold, Government and Monetary Freedom
June 17, 2014
For more than two hundred years, practically all of the leading advocates of individual liberty and free markets have assumed that money and banking were different from other types of goods and markets. From Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, the presumption has be ...
Haven’t We Already Done Enough Damage in Iraq?
June 16, 2014
In 2006, I invited the late General Bill Odom to address my Thursday Congressional luncheon group. Gen. Odom, a former NSA director, called the Iraq war "the greatest strategic disaster in American history," and told the surprised audience that he could not und ...
An Ever Deeper EU to Join the Wall Street Party?
June 14, 2014
European Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs László Andor has delivered a historic speech calling for a deeper union. It is at least in part a response to recent Euro-elections that showed the EU electorate is fed up with "Europe." In "European Com ...
The People Struggle to Find and Retain Representation
June 13, 2014
Dave Brat, a professor of economics at Virginia's Randolph-Macon College, is a marked man. Professor Brat defeated Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a prime trophy of the Israel Lobby. I doubt that Eric Cantor ever lost an opportunity to place Israe ...
Do You Really Want to Be Correct?
June 12, 2014
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." – Henry David Thoreau Evidence that something is wrong with a theory is rarely as obvious as a trout in the milk. This is particularly true when a belief is deeply-held or in ...
An Essay on Property Rights
June 11, 2014
To begin with, I want to make it clear that human beings have a moral nature. That is the kind of individuals they are. This is controversial because a good many people in the social sciences and in society in general have some problems with the idea that we ar ...
The Case for Liberty, Through Thick and Thin
June 10, 2014
The advocates of the "thin" version of a defense of liberty argue that the primary and essential issue concerns the principle and logic of "non-aggression." That is, the classical liberal or libertarian basically should be concerned with one, and only one, issu ...
Obama's Foreign Policy Rhetoric Does Not Match US Actions
June 09, 2014
President Obama's recent foreign policy speech, delivered at this year's West Point graduation ceremony, was a disappointment to anyone who hoped the president might be changing course. The failure of each US intervention thus far in the 21st century might have ...
Reefer Madness Redux
June 07, 2014
The Christian Science Monitor has published an attack on marijuana legalization entitled, "The real marijuana story." The cut line explains, "The common assumption that it's a harmless drug is challenged in a prominent medical journal." That medical journal is ...
The Modern Freedom Movement, 1940-2014
June 06, 2014
It began in the early 1940s. FDR had launched the New Deal's collectivization of America, and a small but prescient group of libertarian and conservative intellectuals were in rebellion – such thinkers as Richard Weaver, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joh ...
The Achilles Heel of Libertarian War Theory: Who Decides?
June 05, 2014
Can a libertarian support or engage in war? Some libertarians point to the right of self-defense to justify going to war. An individual has the right to defend himself with deadly force, if necessary, against an aggressor. If you multiply the justified individu ...
Whatever Became Of Morality?
June 05, 2014
What are we to make of this? http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/03/justice/wisconsin-girl-stabbed/index.html Two 12 year-old white American girls who look perfectly normal stabbed their 12-year old friend 19 times in a murder attempt. By murdering their friend the ...
On Man And Perfection
June 04, 2014
A great many theories of government and social organization rest on consideration of man's perfection. From the time of Plato, philosophers and political theorists have formulated much of their thinking about political communities in line with some view about t ...
The Wisdom of Adam Smith for Our Own Times
June 03, 2014
The continuing growth in government spending, taxing and regulation of economic affairs in the United States and in many other parts of the world has raised anew the essential issue of political control and intervention in the market place. With June 5th markin ...
Mental Health Screening a Good Way to Decrease Liberty, Poor Way to Increase Security
June 02, 2014
Last week Americans were shocked and saddened by another mass killing, this one near a college campus in California. We all feel deep sympathy for the families of the victims. As usual, many people responded to this shooting by calling for new federal gun contr ...
freedom in two years
Is the War on Drugs Over?
May 31, 2014
The US House of Representatives has voted to block federal law enforcement from pursuing users of medical marijuana in states that permit that use. This is just the latest move in the unraveling of marijuana prohibition. It may look as if a spontaneous movement ...
The Soul-Killing Effect of Owning Slaves and Some Feminism
May 29, 2014
In the early 19th century, the American anti-slavery movement called abolitionism made an intriguing argument. Without denying or diminishing the horror of being a slave, abolitionists claimed that the slave owner was also a victim because owning another person ...
Implications of the Fatal Conceit
May 28, 2014
Last week I watched President Obama give a talk about his VA problems. Those of us who have learned the lessons of history and some brilliant political economists, such as the late F. A. Hayek, were not shocked to witness that the VA has been unable to meet its ...
The Importance of the Second Amendment
May 27, 2014
For millions of Americans the Second Amendment and its guarantee of the right of the individual to bear arms appears irrelevant and practically anachronistic. It seems a throwback to those earlier days of the Wild West, when many men, far from the law and order ...
The VA Scandal is Just the Tip of the Military Abuse Iceberg
May 26, 2014
President Obama held a press conference last week to express his outrage over reports that the Veterans Administration was routinely delaying treatment to veterans, with some veterans even dying while on alleged secret waiting lists. The president said that, "i ...
Why War Is Inevitable
May 26, 2014
Memorial Day is when we commemorate our war dead. Like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day is being turned into a celebration of war. Those who lose family members and dear friends to war don't want the deaths to have been in vain. Consequently, wars become glorio ...
Showing 501 - 550 of 1951 – Newest on Top

loading