Regulation Policy & Welfare

Should the State License Human Beings?

by Sheldon Richman November 21, 2007

Democratic presidential candidates are tripping over the driver’s-licenses-for-illegal-aliens issue like a bunch of old slapstick vaudevillians. What’s so comical about their antics is that the issue demonstrates that politicians are locked into bad assumptions from top to bottom. Start with driver’s licenses. In one debate Sen. Chris Dodd said driving ...

Heading Towards the Police State

by Bart Frazier November 14, 2007

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. — Thomas Jefferson Every year the United States becomes less free; the state controls more of our lives, takes more of our money, and takes from ...

Bushs AmeriCorps Fraud

by James Bovard September 1, 2007

Politicians have long used moral doggerel to make citizens docile. Though President Bush is often verbally inept, he has hit the same chords his predecessors played to sway Americans to glorify government workers as moral icons worthy of gratitude and respect. Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Bush announced that he was expanding AmeriCorps and that all of us can ...

Big Government at Home and Abroad

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 17, 2007

On June 22, 2007, Jacob Hornberger was invited to speak before the Houston Property Rights Assocation. The speech can viewed below in its entirety.

Drunken-Driver Checkpoints: Every Driver Guilty

by James Bovard August 1, 2007

Tens of thousands of innocent Americans are stopped each month at police checkpoints that treat every driver as a criminal. These checkpoints, supposedly started to target drunk drivers, have expanded to give police more intrusive power over citizens in many areas. The demonization of alcohol is leading to a growing nullification of the constitutional rights of anyone suspected of drinking ...

The Nanny State’s Road to Serfdom

by Jeffrey A. Singer May 1, 2007

A reader wrote me about my article “The Slippery Slope of Nanny-State Politics,” which appeared in the last issue of Freedom Daily. The article derided the rise of the “nanny state” and its threat to our way of life as a free people. I had written that New York ...

Nanny-State Quandary

by Scott McPherson April 1, 2007

Paternalistic agitators must be in a real quandary. A Massachusetts man is suing his former employer for firing him for smoking. The man lost his job as a lawn-care specialist after testing positive for nicotine. Isn’t this great? After all, anti-smoking types have been haranguing us for years about the dangers ...

The Slippery Slope of Nanny-State Politics

by Jeffrey A. Singer April 1, 2007

On December 5, 2006, the City of New York banned the use of transfats in restaurants and food preparation. Ironically, many of the experts proclaiming the dangers of transfats were the ones who urged us to embrace them as “heart-healthy” in the 1980s. William Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at Harvard University, who was one of the ...

Liberty versus the Morality Police

by George Leef April 1, 2007

Liberty for All: Reclaiming Individual Privacy in a New Era of Public Morality by Elizabeth Price Foley (Yale University Press, 2006); 287 pages, $35.00. Most Americans have settled somnolently into the view that whatever laws are passed are all right because they’re the product of democracy. To be sure, there ...

“It Can’t Happen Here”

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 7, 2007

Also see: “The Critical Dilemma Facing Pro-War Libertarians” “The Pentagon's Power to Arrest, Torture, and Execute Americans” “The Islamo-Fascist Rationale for Abandoning Liberty” In my article “The Pentagon’s Power to Arrest, Torture, and Execute Americans,” I explained that the post–9/11 power to designate Americans as “enemy ...

The Horror – Discriminatory Advertising on the Internet!

by George Leef March 5, 2007

Nothing has ever made it so easy for buyers and sellers to get together and engage in trade as the Internet. It reduces transaction costs immensely because they can find each other so readily. And if one seller doesn’t have what a buyer wants, all that has been lost is the ...

Public-Access TV: Fascism in Action

by Scott McPherson March 1, 2007

Imagine a public-access aisle at your local grocery store. The store would provide the goods it can profit from on other aisles, but there would be a special aisle where certain merchandise would be offered because the local government required it to be offered. Local residents would go to city council meetings and produce petitions signed by their neighbors saying ...