Civil Liberties & Privacy

Liberty and Virtue: Invaluable and Inseparable: Part 2

by Doug Bandow January 1, 2000

Part 1 | Part 2 Attempting to forcibly make people virtuous would make society itself less virtuous in three important ways. First, individuals would lose the opportunity to exercise virtue. They would not face the same set of temptations and be forced to choose between good and evil. In some ...

Custom-Made Abuses at Customs

by James Bovard December 1, 1999

You know it is going to be a bad day when your Customs inspector starts putting on latex gloves. A rising floodtide of scandal is engulfing the Customs Service. Press reports across the nation are trumpeting cases of Customs agents taking bribes and abusing their power. A Treasury Department investigation is looking at the agency's ...

Liberty and Virtue: Invaluable and Inseparable, Part 1

by Doug Bandow December 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 There is no quicker means of raising a skeptical eye among many conservatives and libertarians alike than to endorse both liberty and virtue. Many people who consider freedom the preeminent political objective perceive support for virtue to be an implicit call for restrictive new laws. ...

Waco: Lies, Deaths, and Cover-Ups

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 1999

Afer the bombing of the Alfred J. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, President Clinton declared, "There's nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country." I wonder whether the president still feels the same way in light of the ...

The Art of Plunder

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 1999

Now that the controversy surrounding the art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum has calmed down, it's a good time for some sober reflection. To recap, the museum, which is subsidized with taxpayer money, is hosting an exhibit that includes among other things, a painting purportedly of the Virgin Mary adorned ...

Time to Curb SWAT Rampages

by James Bovard September 1, 1999

SWAT teams are finally getting some overdue bad press. Usually the SWATers are starring in some TV pseudo-docudrama where they go smashing into someone's home and discover him with a dumb look and a bong. However, people are now beginning to ask questions about the wisdom of the routine use of massive police force. Prof. ...

Book Review: Property and Freedom

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1999

Property and Freedom by Richard Pipes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); 328pages; $30. In his 1848 treatise, The Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill stated: "The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical laws. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them.... It is not so with the distribution of ...

The Mirage of Administrative Justice

by James Bovard July 1, 1999

The trademark of modern political thinking is faith in discretionary power wielded by benevolent politicians and administrators and in letting government employees treat private citizens as they think best. We have far more federal agencies than we used to have, and they are under less restraint than what they ...

Sabotaging Privacy for Political Profit

by James Bovard June 1, 1999

Federal regulators announced last December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, a brazen scheme to convert banks into conspirators against their depositors. The "Know Your Customer" rules were a landmark in the history of the attempted subversion of American privacy and property rights. But enough Americans rallied — at least temporarily — to block this power grab. The proposed rules vastly expanded ...

Order by Agreements or by Iron Fists

by James Bovard May 1, 1999

In his 1651 classic, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes warned: "To obey the King who is God's lieutenant, is the same as to obey God. We shall have no peace till we have absolute obedience." Many contemporary statists share Hobbes's assumption that near-total control is the only way to avoid near-certain destruction ...

Know Your Government

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1999

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has a new way to protect us and our banks. It proposes a mandatory program for insured nonmember banks called "Know Your Customer." (Member banks are presumably already under such an obligation.) This is not some friendly way for banks to serve us better. No, this is right out of Orwell. Here's what Big ...

Robbery with an Environmental Badge

by James Bovard March 1, 1999

As the federal government has devoted itself to rescuing Americans from more perils, fair treatment of individuals is a luxury that the government can no longer afford. Few programs better illustrate the modern contempt for due process than Superfund. Congress enacted Superfund in 1980 to deal with the problem of abandoned hazardous waste sites. Since 1980, the Environmental Protection Agency ...