The Banality of Evil in the War on Drugs by Jacob G. Hornberger March 9, 2018 The New York Times published a story this week about prisoners who die while still incarcerated. The article pointed that when prisoners are suffering a fatal illness and have just a short time to live, the law permits them to apply for early release so that they can return home and die among loved ones. It’s society’s way ...
Public Schooling and Killers by Jacob G. Hornberger March 8, 2018 When a child reaches 6 years of age, the state seizes him, forcibly removes him from his family, and places him in a government institution where, for the next 12 years, he is converted into a “good citizen,” one who defers to authority and expresses gratitude that he is living in a free society. Of course, most people don’t think ...
Our Buttinski Government by Jacob G. Hornberger March 7, 2018 Dictionary.com defines a buttinski as a “person who interferes in the affairs of others; meddler.” Although the U.S. government is an entity, not a person, it would be difficult to find a better term to describe it. The U.S. government is a buttinski government, in fact the world’s supreme buttinski government. Consider foreign policy. Even while railing against a group ...
The New York Times’s Democracy Fairy Tale by Jacob G. Hornberger March 6, 2018 One of the consequences of growing up is being struck by the reality that fairy tales that we are taught as children are exactly that — fairy tales. Unfortunately, however, in some cases people continue hewing to fairy tales far into adulthood. A good example of this phenomenon appeared in Sunday’s New York Times in an editorial entitled “Donald ...
Trump’s Tariff Destroys Liberty and Prosperity by Jacob G. Hornberger March 5, 2018 It is amazing to me that there are still people in the world who believe in economic protectionism. The fact that a president of the United States is among them is astounding. President Trump has recently announced that he is imposing a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum. A tariff is a ...
Gun Control and Tyranny by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2018 The reason our American ancestors enacted the Second Amendment was to ensure that the federal government could never impair the right of the American people to resist the tyranny of their own government. The idea was that if the federal government became a tyrannical regime, Americans could, if they chose, resist the tyranny with force. In ...
Back to Killing North Koreans with Sanctions by Jacob G. Hornberger February 28, 2018 Although 19-year-old Ryom Tae Ok and 25-year-old Kim Ju Sik didn’t medal at the Winter Olympics in South Korea, they wowed the crowd with their personalities and their figure-skating performance. They have now returned to North Korea, where President Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment are trying to kill them. That’s what U.S. sanctions against ...
Gun Rights Don’t Come from the Second Amendment by Jacob G. Hornberger February 27, 2018 Whenever there is a gun massacre, statists inevitably respond that it’s time to repeal the Second Amendment. The idea is that if the Second Amendment is gone, so will be the right to own guns in the United States. There is just one big problem with that position: It’s wrong. The Second Amendment, like the First ...
A Heroic Lawsuit Against the Border Patrol in My Hometown by Jacob G. Hornberger February 23, 2018 A controversy near my hometown of Laredo, Texas, provides a real-life example of the violations of liberty and privacy that come with immigration controls. The issue is especially relevant to the libertarian movement given that some conservative-oriented libertarians continue trying to persuade libertarians to abandon their position in favor of open borders and instead join up with conservatives and ...
Disappointment Over Tyler Cowen’s Take on the JFK Assassination by Jacob G. Hornberger February 22, 2018 Anyone familiar with Tyler Cowen knows that he has been blessed with a brilliant and analytical mind. Such being the case, I was particularly interested in reading his Bloomberg article “How to Test Your Favorite Conspiracy Theory,” at least insofar as it related to the assassination of President John Kennedy. I wanted to see how Cowen applied ...
Celebrating the Iranian Plane Crash by Jacob G. Hornberger February 21, 2018 U.S. officials are undoubtedly raising a glass in celebration of an Iranian plane crash last Sunday that killed all 66 people aboard. After all, from the standpoint of the proponents of U.S. sanctions against Iran, the crash is a dream-come-true. The deaths of those 66 people, including one child, will, presumably, anger their families, who will then, hopefully, rise up ...
The Conservative Creed by Jacob G. Hornberger February 20, 2018 We, the conservatives of America, hold that government should just leave us alone … and (1) Should enforce school-compulsory attendance laws that force us to send our children to state-approved schools; and (2) Should force us through income taxation, Social Security, Medicare, farm subsidies, and other mandatory charity programs to help seniors, the poor, and others, and (3) Should incarcerate and fine ...
