Civil Liberties & Privacy

Laundering: The Criminalization of Everything

by James Bovard August 1, 1997

Money-laundering statutes epitomize how the government has shirked going after violent criminals and instead is routinely impaling innocent citizens and penny-ante misfits in order to maximize its number of convictions. If the government cannot catch the guilty, at least it can scourge the innocent. In the same way that ...

Freedom in Transactions

by Fredric Bastiat August 1, 1997

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — Here are a million of human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 5

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Libertarians, unlike conservatives and leftists, believe that people should be free to live their lives any way they wish, as long as their conduct remains peaceful. That is, as long as people do not murder, rape, steal, loot, plunder, defraud, and so ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 In a primitive, economically poor society, a person has to do a lot of basic jobs just to survive. He has to be a master of many trades. But as a society becomes wealthier and more complex, people begin to specialize at ...

The Campaign Finance Red Herring

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 1997

That campaign-finance nonsense is again on the public agenda. The recent episodes involving the Democratic National Committee, the White House, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich have renewed for the umpteenth time the calls for a drastic overhaul of how politics is funded in America. The DNC unilaterally announced it would ...

Smoke If You Want, and Pay for It

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 1997

Tobacco has become a four-letter word. The cigarette companies are getting it from all sides. The federal Food and Drug Administration wants to regulate tobacco as a drug. State governments are suing to recover Medicare money spent on elderly people with tobacco-related illnesses. Heirs of long-time ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Karl Marx wrote that the value of an item is determined by how much labor goes into producing it. A diamond is valuable because of all the work that goes into mining it. Therefore, Marx argued, since value is created by the ...

Mandatory Volunteerism: If Orwell Were Alive, He’d Die of Laughter

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1997

President Clinton has endorsed one of most ridiculous ideas to come down the pike in some time: community service as part of the school curriculum. Is there a single idea packed with so many fallacies? I don't think so. Where to begin? In getting ready for a national service ...

Police Brutality: A License to Maul

by James Bovard April 1, 1997

The Founding Fathers sought to create a "government of laws, not of men." A key principle of this doctrine is that no person is above the law — that every government employee must obey the same laws that government imposes on private citizens. Unfortunately, when it comes to police brutality, ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 What would a free society look like? That is, what if everyone were free to live his life the way he wanted, so long as his conduct was peaceful, and free to enter into any mutually beneficial exchanges with anyone in the ...

The Individual in Society, Part 2

by Ludwig von Mises March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 Liberty and freedom are terms employed for the description of the social conditions of the individual members of a market society in which the power of the indispensable hegemonic bond, the state, is curbed lest the operation of the market be endangered. In a totalitarian system there is nothing to which the attribute "free" ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 If we abolish public schooling, then how will the poor be educated? If drug laws are repealed, won't everyone go on drugs? If Social Security is abolished, won't old people starve to death? If we don't have Medicare and Medicaid, how would ...