The Colonial Venture of Ireland, Part 2 by Wendy McElroy June 1, 2004 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 In the 1840s, a new voice would be heard in Ireland: the Young Irelanders, who urged the Catholic peasantry to return to their Gaelic roots. Literary and political radicals, the Young Irelanders sprinkled Gaelic terms throughout their writings long before the language was revived in order ...
The Colonial Venture of Ireland, Part 1 by Wendy McElroy May 1, 2004 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Irish history has been likened to the cry of wind through a ruined house because so much of it deals with destruction and the breaking of a whole into parts. Centuries of conflict between Catholic and Protestant, Irish rebel and British authority offer a dramatic narrative ...
How Hitler Became a Dictator by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2004 Whenever U.S. officials wish to demonize someone, they inevitably compare him to Adolf Hitler. The message immediately resonates with people because everyone knows that Hitler was a brutal dictator. But how many people know how Hitler actually became a dictator? My bet is, very few. I' d also bet that more than a few people would be surprised at how ...
Campaign Finance Won’t Square the Circle by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2004 The new restrictions on freedom that constitute campaign-finance reform raise some important issues in political philosophy. It would have been nice if the five Supreme Court justices who upheld the law had addressed those issues. They didnt even notice them. The majority said Congress violated no constitutional stricture, particularly the First Amendment, when it barred political parties from raising or ...
What Bush Did Wrong during the War by Sheldon Richman February 23, 2004 The brouhaha over what President Bush did or didnt do in Alabama during the war in Vietnam misses the point. Even if he put in all the time required by the Air National Guard, the real question, which nearly everyone evades, is: what obligation did a young man have with respect to that war? Every respectable politician must say (if ...
Don’t Look to Politicians for Inspiration by Sheldon Richman February 11, 2004 The other day I heard someone lament that the current field of presidential contenders includes no one who can be looked to for inspiration. My first response was to wonder why anyone would look to that group for inspiration in the first place? Why indeed? I’m not sure where Americans got ...
Are We Electing a Military Ruler or a President? by Jacob G. Hornberger February 2, 2004 Amidst all the hubbub among the Democratic Party candidates for president over who supported President Bush’s invasion of Iraq and who didn’t, have you noticed that not one of them has brought up the Constitution and, specifically, the constitutional requirement that the president secure a congressional declaration of ...
A Bush-Clinton Ticket Would Be Unbeatable by Jacob G. Hornberger January 14, 2004 In view of President Bush’s State of the Union address, I’ve got a great idea as to how the president can guarantee himself reelection — dump Dick Cheney as his vice-presidential running mate and select Bill Clinton instead. Think about it: Bush and Clinton share the exact same philosophical vision for the role of government ...
Keep Politics Away from Money by Sheldon Richman December 22, 2003 The supporters of campaign-finance regulation, and now a bare majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, are trying to square the circle. They want a vast distributive state in which politicians dispense favors at the expense of others without the appearance of corruption. An inherently corrupt system with no appearance of corruption is about as likely as, well, a square ...
Were the Feds Capable of Killing JFK? by Jacob G. Hornberger November 24, 2003 Forty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the debate over whether there was a conspiracy to kill him rages on, and the History Channels series suggesting that U.S. officials were involved in such a conspiracy certainly raises disturbing questions regarding the issue. What seems somewhat amusing, however, is the long-held position of the mainstream ...
Bad Medicine by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2003 Those who have been hungering for a real political debate in this country can’t help but be deliriously overcome with the news that CBS’s 60 Minutes will feature 10 face-offs between former Democratic President Bill Clinton and former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. The history of political thought will ...
Ballot-Access Laws: A High Cost of Running for Office by Bart Frazier September 12, 2003 The field of economics has had an interesting history in that the principles developed during its evolution have been widely applied to many other fields, one of them being politics. Nowhere today does the economic principle of transaction costs reveal more about politics than in California.