Hornberger's Blog is a daily libertarian blog written by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of FFF.
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by Jacob G. Hornberger
On the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, let us never forget the role that the U.S. government played in engendering the anger and hatred that produced the attacks.
Yes, I know the standard statist response: “You’re a justifier! You’re a justifier! You’re just justifying the 9/11 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans.”
But that’s nothing more than a clever tactic ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
I don’t understand why Mitt Romney doesn’t offer to replace Joe Biden as President Obama’s running mate. Wouldn’t that save everyone a lot of time, money, and energy? After all, is there any real fundamental difference between Obama and Romney?
Of course there isn’t. This was most recently demonstrated in an interview Romney gave on “Meet the Press.” According to ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Yesterday I happened to tune in on the radio to a fascinating and boring exchange between conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity and a liberal economist named Austan Goolsbee, who used to serve on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors.
The exchange was boring, for me as a libertarian, because it involved the standard solution proposed by liberals and conservatives to ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
When Republicans talk about the exceptional nature of the U.S. government, they might well be referring to both its brutality and its hypocrisy. Such characteristics are on full display in a just-released report by Human Rights Watch, which details how the CIA during the Bush administration renditioned people to Libya for the purpose of torture.
Libya? Yes, I know what ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
American statists love to tell us how important it is that the U.S. government continue spending and borrowing ever-increasing amounts of money. They say all that spending and borrowing is the key to economic prosperity. Stimulus, they call it. By spending and borrowing, the government “stimulates” the economy, which then becomes strong and booming.
That’s why statists don’t give a ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
When the next U.S. debt ceiling comes around, one thing is for sure: the mainstream press will be shouting and crying about how important it is to lift the ceiling once again, thereby permitting the federal government to pile even more debt onto the backs of the American people.
Unfortunately, in the period of time leading up to the debt ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Imagine if you lived in a society in which the state controlled religion in the same way that it currently controls education. Imagine that this has been going on for more than a century.
Each locality is divided into church districts. Parents are required by law to send their children to a state-run church within the district in which they ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
One of the favorite mantras of conservatives is “We favor small government.” As the conservative Wall Street Journal put it, “Rep. Paul Ryan took the national political stage Wednesday as the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate, giving a televised speech that laid out one of the GOP’s sharpest cases yet … for Republicans as the party of small government. ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post yesterday, entitled “A Storm Inside the GOP Convention,” detailed some rather shabby treatment of Ron Paul and his delegates by Mitt Romney and the Republican establishment. Milbank writes: “The Romney campaign had taken pains to stifle the Paul rebellion, by denying him a speaking role, expediting the roll call, changing ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Not surprisingly, in the wake of the recent shooting in front of the Empire State Building, the gun-control crowd has surfaced again. After Jeffrey Johnson shot and killed former co-worker Steven Ercolino, gun controllers trotted out their old familiar mantra, “This shows, once again, how badly we need gun control.”
What?
Somebody needs to inform these people of a very basic ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
While the Obama camp and even some in the GOP ranks are upset with Mitt Romney for bringing up the issue of President Obama’s birth certificate, the reason Romney did it might well be that it’s the only issue on which he and Obama disagree. On all the fundamental issues, with the exception of abortion, the two candidates are ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Notice that all the talk about whether the U.S. government should attack Iran and Syria focuses on whether President Obama will order his army to attack these two countries or on whether he should do so. The process has become so natural and normal that it’s easy to forget the dictatorial nature of the power that the president now ...