“In China, At Least I Would Have a Trial” by Jacob G. Hornberger September 29, 2009 The U.S. government has just received the ultimate put-down from one of its Guantanamo prisoners. Arkin Mahmud, a Chinese Uighur who has been held at the prison camp for 8 years, stated ruefully, “In China, at least I would have a trial and sentence.” What bigger insult than to be accused of providing ...
My Appearance on Judge Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” by Jacob G. Hornberger September 28, 2009 Last week I had the good fortune of appearing on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Internet program “Freedom Watch.” You can see the video here. The topic was “Auditing the Fed” but most of the discussion revolved around ending the Federal Reserve System. I pointed out how the Fed is an engine of government confiscation of wealth, one that enables ...
Public Schooling Is Like the Army by Jacob G. Hornberger September 25, 2009 The Right is in an uproar over a video that has surfaced on YouTube showing schoolchildren at a public elementary school in New Jersey being trained to sing a paean to President Barack Obama. Conservatives say that the song is no different than what schoolchildren were trained to do in Nazi Germany and Maoist ...
The Second-Best Solution to Health Care: Do Nothing by Jacob G. Hornberger September 24, 2009 The second-best solution for the health-care crisis? Do nothing. Of course, that drives the interventionists crazy. “Do nothing?” they cry! “Don’t you realize that we’re in a crisis? We can’t afford to do nothing!” What they fail to realize is a fundamental principle about interventionism: It produces more crises. Therefore, any new health-care intervention, whether termed ...
Private Attorneys Are Not “Officers of the Court” by Jacob G. Hornberger September 23, 2009 According to a recent article in the New York Times, a private attorney has been reprimanded by the Florida Bar Association for describing a local judge as an “evil, unfair witch” on his blog. The lawyer was angry over the judge’s practice of giving criminal-defense lawyers only a week to prepare for trial ...
The Pentagon Is Bankrupting Us by Jacob G. Hornberger September 22, 2009 Consider this excerpt from The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post: Gorbachev had concluded that the sprawling Soviet defense establishment — the army, navy, air force, strategic rocket forces, air defense forces, ...
A Hypothetical Invasion of Bolivia by Jacob G. Hornberger September 21, 2009 Suppose the world had awakened this morning to the news that the Russian army had attacked and invaded Bolivia. Thousands of Russian paratroopers have landed in the country, securing airports, permitting hundreds of Russian transport planes to bring in tens of thousands of Russian soldiers. Despite being badly outmanned and outgunned, ...
The Epoch Battle of Our Time by Jacob G. Hornberger September 18, 2009 It seems as though every statist has his favorite health-care reform and, more important, is convinced that his particular reform is the one that is finally going to make socialism and interventionism succeed. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but it just ain’t gonna happen. Socialism and interventionism are inherently defective. They cannot be made ...
Operation Northwoods and the 9/11 Truthers by Jacob G. Hornberger September 17, 2009 Writing about the recent resignation of Van Jones, President Obama’s appointee to be green-jobs czar, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer says good riddance. What set Krauthammer off was not that Jones had once used profanity to describe Republicans or even that he might have been a self-proclaimed communist. What made Krauthammer angry and ...
China’s Retaliation against Obama’s Protectionism by Jacob G. Hornberger September 16, 2009 Several years ago, neocon supporters of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions didn’t pay much heed to how their adventures were placing our nation in a very precarious financial condition. Ironically, a liberal president, through his devotion to labor unions, might now be making that risk much greater and more likely to materialize. You’ll recall that ...
Interventionism, Empire, and the Taliban by Jacob G. Hornberger September 15, 2009 The U.S. government’s primary justification for continuing the occupation of Afghanistan is to prevent the Taliban from regaining power and providing a sanctuary for al-Qaeda. Ironically, however, this is another example of the disastrous consequences of imperialism and interventionism, for it was the U.S. invasion itself that created the problem that now serves as ...
McGovern’s Socialism by Jacob G. Hornberger September 14, 2009 Liberal George McGovern has a simple solution to the health-care crisis. In an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post, McGovern recommended that we simply extend Medicare, which currently is limited to people over 65, to everyone else. Like most other people on the dole, McGovern loves his government-provided health care: “Those of ...
