Sheldon Richman's TGIF

TGIF: Unjust Immigration Law Is Not Law

by Sheldon Richman November 21, 2014

So President Obama is going to defer deportation of five million people without government papers, mostly parents of children whom the government deems citizens or legal permanent residents. Under his executive order, most will get permission to work. Obama will also increase the number of “dreamers” — children brought here illegally by their parents and raised in the United States ...

TGIF: Free-Market Socialism

by Sheldon Richman November 14, 2014

Libertarians are individualists. But since individualist has many senses, that statement isn’t terribly informative. Does it mean that libertarians are social nonconformists on principle? Not at all. Some few libertarians may aspire to be, but most would see that as undesirable because it would obstruct their most important objectives. Lots of libertarian men have no problem wearing a jacket and ...

TGIF: The Political Sterility of Jon Stewart

by Sheldon Richman November 7, 2014

Political satire has a long and honorable history: Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift; W.S. Gilbert; Mark Twain; George Orwell; Lenny Bruce; Dick Gregory; Tom Lehrer,  David Frost, and That Was the Week That Was; George Carlin; Spitting Image, Yes, Minister; the Smothers Brothers; the early Saturday Night Live, Dave Barry, The Onion, South Park, Family Guy, and so many more. Unfortunately, while it ...

TGIF: Nothing Is More Local than the Individual

by Sheldon Richman October 31, 2014

On Tuesday the voters of the state in which I dwell, Arkansas, will be asked to vote yes or no on this: A proposed amendment to the Arkansas Constitution to provide that, effective July 1, 2015, the manufacture, sale, distribution and transportation of intoxicating liquors is lawful within the entire geographic area of each and every county of this state; ...

TGIF: The State Is No Friend of the Worker

by Sheldon Richman October 24, 2014

The election season is upon us, and we’re hearing the usual political promises about raising wages. Democrats pledge to raise the minimum wage and assure equal pay for equal work for men and women. Republicans usually oppose those things, but their explanations are typically lame. (“The burden on small business would be increased too much.”) Some Republicans endorse raising ...

TGIF: Leonard P. Liggio (1933–2014)

by Sheldon Richman October 17, 2014

I lost one of my favorite teachers this week, as did so many other libertarians, not to mention  the freedom movement as a whole. Leonard P. Liggio, 81, died after a period of declining health. Leonard was a major influence on my worldview during the nearly 40 years I knew him. While I had not seen him much in ...

TGIF: A Foreign Policy By and For Knaves

by Sheldon Richman October 10, 2014

David Hume (1711-1776) was no hardcore libertarian, but he was a provocative thinker and a key figure in the development of liberalism. Hume helped make the Scottish Enlightenment the important period it was. He also can be fun to read. Observe this from his essay “Of the Independency of Parliament”: Political writers have established it as a maxim, ...

TGIF: The “Boomerang Effect”: How Foreign Policy Changes Domestic Policy

by Sheldon Richman September 26, 2014

The late Chalmers Johnson, the great analyst of the American empire, warned that if Americans didn’t give up the empire, they would come to live under it. We’ve had many reasons to take his warning seriously; indeed, several important thinkers have furnished sound theoretical and empirical evidence for the proposition. Now come two scholars who advance our understanding of how ...

TGIF: The Antimilitarist Libertarian Heritage

by Sheldon Richman September 19, 2014

With the United States on the verge of another war in the Middle East — or is it merely the continuation of a decades-long war? — we libertarians need to reacquaint ourselves with our intellectual heritage of peace, antimilitarism, and anti-imperialism. This rich heritage is too often overlooked and frequently not appreciated at all. That is tragic. Libertarianism, to ...

TGIF: Ownership and Ideas

by Sheldon Richman September 12, 2014

Like many libertarians, I’ve learned a lot from Murray Rothbard on a wide variety of subjects. Of course, no one gets everything right, especially someone as intellectually ambitious, multidisciplinary, and prolific as Rothbard. Nevertheless, reading the work of the man who left such a mark on the modern libertarian movement is as profitable as it is pleasurable. While rereading

TGIF: Does Freedom Require Empire?

by Sheldon Richman September 5, 2014

In a startling article, Daniel McCarthy, the admirable editor of The American Conservative magazine (TAC), writes, “Successive British and American empires created and upheld the world order in which liberalism could flourish.” In other words, as he writes in “Why Liberalism Means Empire,” “Liberalism and ...

TGIF: “The Police Force Is Watching the People”

by Sheldon Richman August 22, 2014

Political philosophy — the libertarian philosophy included — can take you only so far. The libertarian philosophy provides grounds for condemning aggression, that is, the initiation of force, and along with some supplemental considerations, it identifies in the abstract what constitutes aggression, victimhood, and self-defense. But the philosophy can’t identify the aggressor and victim in particular cases; relevant empirical ...