STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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June 22, 2015
In a literal sense, the word "tragedy" does not describe what happened in Charleston, South Carolina last week. Storms and earthquakes are tragic. No human summons these events and no human can stop them. Murder, on the other hand, is entirely human. It occurs ...
June 22, 2015
Nebraska's legislature recently made headlines when it ended the state's death penalty. Many found it odd that a conservatives-dominated legislature would support ending capital punishment, since conservative politicians have traditionally supported the death p ...
June 20, 2015
Power is always grandiose and self-glorifying. But it is also self-destructive. It is the great error of productive people that they blindly obey power and contribute to its stupidity. Nonetheless, power always seems to hit its limits, where it rots in place an ...
June 20, 2015
The problem with responding to Alan Wolfe’s feeble attempt to critique libertarianism is that one might appear to be defending the particular people he targets: namely, Rand Paul and Ayn Rand. (Rand Paul was not named after Ayn Rand. At least Wolfe avoided th ...
June 19, 2015
The war between those who oppose and embrace genetically modified food crops has almost no middle ground. Those who know what "GMO" means are enthusiastically for or against it. We explained back in April how The Free Market is Solving the GMO Problem. Consumer ...
June 19, 2015
If you want a recent, vivid example of the corrosive effect the Drug War has on the character of law enforcement, look to the actions of the officers who raided Sky High Holistic, a medical marijuana dispensary located in Santa Ana, California, on May 27th of t ...
June 18, 2015
We saw the Navy's "Global Force for Good" commercials on TV a few months ago, and thought them strange at the time. The service it portrayed bore no resemblance to reality. Instead of carrier-launched fighter jets pursuing terrorists, it showed earnest youngste ...
June 18, 2015
Intellectuals have long been glorified as champions of truth and defenders of society's highest values. But in Washington, they serve as Leviathan's Praetorian Guard. Intellectuals are thriving in DC thanks in large part to the ruinous policy advice they proffe ...
June 17, 2015
The secretive Bilderberg group held its annual conclave at an Austrian mountain resort last weekend. As the Guardian article says, the event was private in every imaginable way. Invited guests only, Chatham House rules, everything off the record and certainly n ...
June 17, 2015
Syriza, the new Greek government that intended to rescue Greece from austerity, has come a cropper. The government relied on the good will of its EU "partners," only to find that its "partners" had no good will. The Greek government did not understand that the ...
June 17, 2015
“Free worlders” is prison slang for those who are not incarcerated behind prison walls. Supposedly, those fortunate souls live in the “free world.” However, appearances can be deceiving. “As I got closer to retiring from the Federal Bureau of Prisons ...
June 16, 2015
Newspapers once had journalistic standards, one of which was not to report events as factual without a primary source and a confirming second source. Those standards fell away long ago. The Sunday Times claims National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowd ...
June 16, 2015
American "progressives" portray themselves as "forward-looking," advocates of a higher and better freedom than the traditional American conception of liberty as freedom from government coercion and control. In fact, they are the intellectual great-grandchildren ...
June 15, 2015
The quadrennial American presidential slugfest is right around the corner. Our wish here at Chez Gastonne is that all the candidates would lose and the country proceed into the future confidently leaderless. Sadly, that is not one of the options. We took note o ...
June 15, 2015
If you look at the track record of the interventionists you might think they would pause before taking on more projects. Each of their past projects has ended in disaster yet still they press on. Last week the website Zero Hedge posted a report about hacked ema ...
June 13, 2015
As many of us have noted (loudly and often), centralization is the executioner of liberty and prosperity. That truth is seen very clearly in the history of Rome. Continued from last week… THE ECONOMIC FALL OF ROME This slave economy was a crucial factor in th ...
June 12, 2015
News coverage of the McKinney police incident faded quickly once the out-of-control Cpl. Casebolt resigned. Most commentary has been on the racial dimension, but we are more interested in the growing disconnect between the American public and those who are supp ...
June 12, 2015
"But can the debate really be as one-sided as I portray it? Well, look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible!" Thus ...
June 11, 2015
That the Federal Reserve is an insular institution should surprise no one. Nor should the fact that it lets valuable information leak to the benefit of its friends. This time, however, members of Congress are taking an interest in the matter, and the Fed is not ...
June 11, 2015
Sir Patrick Stewart, of Jean Luc Picard/Professor X fame, has recently come under fire for defending the embattled North Irish bakery, Asher's Baking Company, that refused to bake a cake with a pro-gay rights theme: "Stewart called the Asher's case "a delicious ...
June 10, 2015
This Reuters opinion article makes some odd claims about China and international trade. It ends by condemning the nascent Trans-Pacific Partnership. There are plenty of better reasons to oppose TPP. The author first blames economic interdependence for China's " ...
June 10, 2015
Reflecting on my life, I find a warm sense of kinship with Forrest Gump. For the handful of you unfamiliar with the fictional Mr. Gump, he’s a cranially challenged individual who by pure happenstance ends up living an extraordinary life brimming with interest ...
June 10, 2015
“Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s a shell game intended to keep us focused on and distracted b ...
June 09, 2015
The FBI has a problem. Not enough terrorists are plotting to attack the United States, so agents find they must manufacture more of them. The method appears to be working, too. Dozens of FBI-appointed terrorists now sit safely in prison and no longer threaten t ...
June 09, 2015
The media has been full of stories recently about the new sensitivity on college and university campuses concerning the avoidance in courses or assignments of the use of "trigger words" or phrases that may have a "hurtful" effect on students when thoughtlessly ...
June 08, 2015
Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi may be the most honest politician on the planet, at least judging by this one statement. His troops most certainly did "lose a lot of weapons." Let's add this up. Iraqi forces abandoned and/or lost some 2,300 armored Humvees, 40 M1A1 ...
June 08, 2015
Soros is very close to the Ukrainian president, who was put in power after a US-backed coup deposed the elected leader of Ukraine last year. In the email correspondence, Soros tells the Ukrainian leadership that the US should provide Ukraine "with same level of ...
June 06, 2015
If you want to analyze a large economic system, the best way to start is by tracking its surplus. Who gathers the surplus? Where does it go? Who decides? And that applies to our modern systems just as well as it does historical systems. THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF P ...
June 05, 2015
Government action is necessary, we are told, to solve thorny social problems and keep everyone safe. The Rohingya refugees prove the point wrong. One government drove them into desperation and exile, several other governments refused to help and humble citizens ...
June 05, 2015
Sen. Rand Paul accomplished something worthwhile when, almost single-handedly, he saw to it that Section 215 of the Patriot Act expired. For that he deserves our heartfelt thanks. But where does the expiration now leave us opponents of indiscriminate government ...
June 04, 2015
Almost everything the president says about the USA Freedom Act is false. He does not at all "welcome" the law's passage. If Obama had his way, Congress would have never even considered this law because the National Security Agency's illegal activities would sti ...
June 04, 2015
“A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy.”—Writers Against Mass Surveillance. THE GOOD NEWS: Americans have a right to freely express themselves on the Internet, including making threatening—e ...
June 03, 2015
There was a time in America when fear of government observation would get one accused of tinfoil-hat paranoia. Those days are gone. Thanks to Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers, we know Big Brother is watching. The only question is how close. The newest de ...
June 03, 2015
If you're interested in knowing which scepters of power the Warfare State is most unwilling to relinquish, try wrenching a few from its grasp. The volume of the cacophony will let you know just how grievously the beast in DC has been wounded. And it's never roa ...
June 03, 2015
Students in the state's official propaganda institutions learn about the wonders of the democratic process, so called, throughout their years of formal study. But the truth is on full display during a presidential election season. These are not wise statesm ...
June 02, 2015
Former House Speaker Denny Hastert's indictment is remarkable for several reasons, not least being the way it exposes the U.S. government's inherent corruption. Why is it that former senators and representatives so often become wealthy? It is because they can d ...
June 02, 2015
Keynesians never seem to learn. Every time an economy slows down or reverses gears and "goes negative," in terms of growth and employment, their only answer is a call for "aggregate demand" stimulus and more government spending manipulation. An example of this ...
June 01, 2015
Misty-eyed Americans who sing of "the rockets' red glare" miss the irony the rest of the world sees. All the evidence suggests we love nothing more than lobbing missiles at countries that resist our will. Daniel Larison, the writer quoted above, references this ...
June 01, 2015
This month Congress will consider whether to renew the charter of the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank). Ex-Im Bank is a New Deal-era federal program that uses taxpayer funds to subsidize the exports of American businesses. Foreign businesses, including state-own ...
June 01, 2015
The standard narrative floating about the mainstream press is that the developing world is held back by a quagmire of free market fundamentalism. Sure, there are a few exceptions to this narrative, such as Peter Bauer and William Easterly. But pretty much all w ...
May 30, 2015
Rome deviates from the cultural pattern we have been examining in that their creativity was not home grown and they did not simply overrun nearby creative peoples. Instead, they gathered to themselves the good ideas of distant peoples and made use of them, with ...
May 29, 2015
Efforts to end prohibition of marijuana use by adults in the US continue to move forward at the state level. Legal sales are already underway in Colorado and Washington State with Oregon, Alaska and Washington DC not far behind. Some limited form of medical mar ...
May 29, 2015
My distrust has deepened of Seymour Hersh’s retelling of the Obama regime’s extra-judicial murder of Osama bin Laden by operating illegally inside a sovereign country. That Hersh’s story, which is of very little inherent interest, received such a large a ...
May 28, 2015
If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, the National Football League must be something even lower. Those feel-good moments in the pregame are simply nothing more than your tax dollars at work. On the other hand, we all know the NFL is in business to mak ...
May 28, 2015
Regarding the feverish effort either to reauthorize, "reform," or abolish the National Security Agency's collection of our phone and email data, two things need to be said: First, thank you, Edward Snowden. Second, isn't it great to see the ruling elite panicki ...
May 27, 2015
As taxes go, state-run lotteries seem like a good idea. No one forces you to pay, they don't infringe on your privacy, and the games raise money very efficiently. The Washington Post writer points out that lotteries prey disproportionately on the poor. People w ...
May 27, 2015
We now have a fourth branch of government. As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above a ...
May 27, 2015
Argentina will hold elections this year, and a number of provinces will be electing governors. Buenos Aires, the capital city, is holding elections for mayor, and Mauricio Macri, who is stepping down as mayor, is a favorite to become the next president. Toward ...
May 26, 2015
We are not at all surprised that the Bank of England or any other central bank would lie about its activities. Having their own documents prove they are lying is unusual, however. This might have been a major embarrassment for the BOE, but the financial media e ...
May 26, 2015
Financial markets in the United States and around the world are all waiting with "bated breath" for when the Federal Reserve modifies its "easy money" policy and starts to raise interest rates. No one, however, asks a simple question: Why is the American centra ...
