The Abolitionist Adventure, Part 2 by Wendy McElroy August 1, 2003 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 On August 31, 1831, a Virginia slave named Nat Turner instigated a slave revolt in which a slave owner and his family were killed. Eventually, the victims of Turner’s band exceeded 50. The South exploded with fear and rage, with many blaming Northern abolitionists, especially William Lloyd Garrison. A Virginia paper called ...
Book Review: Defend America First by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 2003 Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 1939–1942 by Garet Garrett (Caldwell, Idaho, 2003); 285 pages; $13.95. It has now long been taken for granted by the American citizenry that the president of the United States, in his role as commander in chief, has the authority and power to send American armed forces into harm’s ...
Reimporting Drugs Is OK, But It Misses the Point by Sheldon Richman July 30, 2003 The U.S. House and Senate have approved bills to legalize the reimportation of U.S.-manufactured prescription drugs from Canada and elsewhere. Here’s a case of Congress doing something right for the wrong reason. It’s right because the U.S. government has no business telling the American people what they may and may ...
Is “Bambi” Libertarian? by Scott McPherson July 25, 2003 Many libertarians are labeled amoral or immoral because they refuse to allow ethics to impinge upon politics. For libertarians, government exists not to make people do what are generally perceived as good things so much as it exists to keep them from doing genuinely bad things to other people. ...
Barges and Birds, Politics and the Market by Bart Frazier July 25, 2003 In a move that delighted environmentalists, a U.S. district judge recently ordered the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) to lower the water level of the Missouri River in order to provide suitable nesting habitat for endangered bird species. However, the move will have detrimental effects on shipping, and the ...
Even with Weapons, Hussein Was No Threat by Sheldon Richman July 23, 2003 The glaring absence of unconventional Iraqi arms should not blind us to the fact that even if Saddam Hussein had amassed chemical, biological, and — yes — even nuclear weapons, he would not have posed a threat to the American people. As offensive tools, those weapons would have been ...
Justices Show Their True Colors by Scott McPherson July 16, 2003 The recent Supreme Court ruling overturning a Texas sodomy law has received a great deal of attention from “gay rights” groups, Christian conservatives, and just about everyone in between, all ready to offer their opinion of how the Court’s decision will affect future legislation, federalism, and social conduct in ...
Is Fraud a High Crime or Misdemeanor? by Jacob G. Hornberger July 16, 2003 In claiming that 16 controversial words in his State of the Union address last January were technically correct, the president is implying that he didn’t actually deceive — or intend to deceive — the American people. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the president wants people to focus only on the technical wording ...
The Lake of the Woods by Bart Frazier July 16, 2003 Like most other Americans, this past Independence Day found me watching fireworks. I was with my family at Lake of the Woods, a private community in Orange County, Virginia, where we were all gathered along a lake’s edge with thousands of other people to watch one of the best ...
False in One, False in All by Sheldon Richman July 14, 2003 When I was a newspaper reporter covering the criminal courts in Pennsylvania, lawyers always told juries they were entitled to apply this old legal principle to any witness: falsis in unum, falsis in omnibus — false in one thing, false in all things. This means that if jurors determined that ...
Crossing the Rubicon by Jacob G. Hornberger July 11, 2003 Have you noticed how many Americans get upset over the comparisons that are increasingly being made between the United States and National Socialist Germany? After all, it’s not as though we’re living in a police state, right? Well, if U.S. officials could somehow assure us that the U.S. government’s treatment ...
What’s Happened to America? by Sheldon Richman July 4, 2003 Who says the government schools and the welfare state don’t work? They work perfectly. They were designed to put the American people into a political coma, and that’s what they’ve done. The objective would never be framed that way. The politicians would say that the purpose was to create ...