Daily Articles

Hamilton’s Betrayal

by George Leef June 1, 2009

Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — and What It Means for America Today by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Crown Forum 2008); 232 pages. There is a tendency among Americans to think of the nation’s Founders as a group of wealthy white men who owned property, didn’t like ...

Not another Runaway Entitlement Program

by Jim Powell May 27, 2009

We have had more than seven decades of experience with entitlement programs, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the first big one in 1935. Now Barack Obama is pushing another big entitlement program — government-run health care. We don’t need to rely on his promises, since we can reflect on our ...

Guantánamo and the Many Failures of U.S. Politicians

by Andy Worthington May 26, 2009

In the summer of 2002, as Jane Mayer described it in her book The Dark Side, “The CIA, concerned by the paucity of valuable information emanating from , dispatched a senior intelligence analyst, who was fluent in Arabic and expert on Islamic extremism, to find out what the problem was.” After interviewing a random sample of two dozen ...

Socialism: Faith Trumps Reality

by Ralph R. Reiland May 21, 2009

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman got it right about a lot of things, but he was overly optimistic when he wrote in 1990 that socialism was dead. “Ten years ago, many people around the world believed that socialism was a viable, even the most promising, system for promoting material prosperity and human freedom,” wrote Friedman. ...

Why Do We Need the SEC?

by Jim Powell May 19, 2009

FDR established the Securities & Exchange Commission to protect people in securities markets. Yet there already were plenty of laws against theft and fraud, crimes that are seldom exposed by government regulators. Consider the succession of big Wall Street scandals since the late 1990s. It’s hard to find a single case ...

Pain at Guantánamo and Paralysis in Government

by Andy Worthington May 18, 2009

Although I reported last week about an important court case in favor of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, there was little in the way of progress, during the first 115 days of the Obama administration, for the men who are still held, despite the president’s pledge to close the prison within a year. ...

FDR’s Biggest Mistake During the Depression

by Jim Powell May 15, 2009

FDR didn’t know what to do about the Great Depression he inherited from Herbert Hoover, so he tried everything. He hiked taxes, spent more money, established monopolies, enforced cartels, filed antitrust lawsuits, promoted compulsory unionism, multiplied business regulations, denounced investors, and started welfare programs, public works projects, a big ...

How U.S. Officials Circumvented the Bill of Rights

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 13, 2009

In another embrace of President Bush’s war-on-terrorism policies, President Obama has announced that he might retain the Pentagon’s military-commission system to try people accused of terrorism. Apparently, the president, like the U.S. military, lacks confidence in the federal judicial system established by the Framers to handle criminal cases involving terrorism. For those who still doubt ...

Obama’s Empire

by Sheldon Richman May 12, 2009

Why isn’t the honeymoon over yet? That all peace advocates still haven’t broken with Barack Obama is ominous, indeed. Do they really hate war, empire, and colonialism? Or did they just hate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Obama has been in power more than 100 days, which is time enough to judge ...

The Death of Rendition Victim Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

by Andy Worthington May 11, 2009

From Libya comes news of the death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a former “ghost prisoner” of the United States, whose false confession about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein — extracted under torture in Egypt — was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. The news will only add to the woes of the senior Bush administration ...

Liberty Creates Order

by Sheldon Richman May 8, 2009

David Brooks, the New York Times’s resident neoconservative, delights in peddling a false alternative: freedom or social order. His latest column hawking this snake oil comes in the form of advice to the struggling Republican Party: “If the Republicans are going to rebound, they will have to reestablish themselves as the ...

U.S. Foreign Policy Caused the Taliban Problem

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 8, 2009

U.S. officials are now concerned not only with a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan but also a Taliban takeover in Pakistan. These problems, however, were caused by the U.S. Empire itself. While most Americans now view President Bush’s Iraq War as a “bad war,” the common perception is that Bush’s invasion ...