America Must Reject Netanyahu’s War Cry on Iran by Sheldon Richman March 4, 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington this week to prepare the American people for war against Iran. Backed by American neoconservatives, the Israel lobby, and assorted other war hawks, Netanyahu insists that Iran intends to build a nuclear weapon and thus is an “existential threat” to Israel. He has no confidence that President Obama will negotiate an agreement that once and for ...
The Folly and Presumption of Big Government Social Engineers by Richard M. Ebeling March 3, 2015 One of the social mythologies of our time is that it is in the power and ability of governments to remake society in any image or shape that those with political authority consider “good,” “right,” and “just” for mankind. No other idea has caused more horror and hardship in modern times. The extreme attempts at such “social engineering” in the ...
The Libertarian Angle: Presidential Politics and Benjamin Netanyahu by Future of Freedom Foundation March 2, 2015 Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: the upcoming visit by Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu . The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.
The Cuban Embargo and the Perversion of American Values by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2015 It would be difficult to find a better example of how the adoption of America’s post–World War II national-security state perverted the morals, principles, and values of the American people than the 54-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba. Now that the issue of lifting the embargo has fully erupted into the political sphere, Americans have an opportunity to question not ...
“And the Pursuit of Happiness”: Nathaniel Branden, RIP by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2015 Libertarians and others have wondered why Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of In-dependence concludes its explicitly incomplete list of unalienable rights with the pursuit of happiness rather than property. The website Monticello.org states, Unfortunately, Thomas Jefferson himself never explained his use of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. However, he was almost certainly influenced by George Mason’s Virginia ...
Know-Nothing Democracy on Capitol Hill by James Bovard March 1, 2015 “You can lead a man to Congress but you can’t make him think,” quipped Milton Berle in 1950. Last December’s congressional approval of the 1,603-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus bill (known as “Cromnibus,” because it was also a Continuing Resolution) also shows you cannot make congressmen read. Unfortunately, as usual, politicians refused to let their ignorance restrain their power over ...
Official Homicide and Legal Rhetoric in Mr. Barron’s Memo by Joseph R. Stromberg March 1, 2015 The Barron Memo released last summer — if “released” means badly mangled — is an interesting literary production. Its full title is “Applicability of Federal Criminal Laws and the Constitution to Contemplated Lethal Operations Against Shaykh Anwar al-Aulaqi.” Here, David J. Barron, who was acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), argued as of July ...
A Most Radical Libertarian Book by Laurence M. Vance March 1, 2015 Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion by Thomas E. Woods Jr. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2014), 338 pages. In his foreword to one of Tom Woods’s previous books, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul described him as “one of the libertarian movement’s brightest and most prolific scholars.” Paul mentions his endorsement in ...
Cruel Compassion by George Leef March 1, 2015 Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed by Jason L. Riley (Encounter Books 2014), 407 pages. When he was asked, following the abolition of slavery, what the country should do with the Negro, Frederick Douglass issued this thunderous reply: “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing ...
Missing the Point about Flourishing by Kevin Carson March 1, 2015 Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change Movement by Edmund Phelps (Princeton University Press 2013), 392 pages. Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps evaluates economic systems with a view to how they promote human prosperity, or “flourishing”: engagement, meeting challenges, self-expression, and personal growth.... A person’s flourishing comes from the experience of the new: new situations, new problems, ...
TGIF: The War of 1812 Was the Health of the State, Part 1 by Sheldon Richman February 27, 2015 Part 1 | Part 2 In 1918, having watched in horror as his Progressive friends gleefully jumped onto Woodrow Wilson’s war wagon, Randolph Bourne penned the immortal words: “War is the health of the state.” As he explained it, The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions. What it has ...
Domestic Fear Is the Price of Empire by Sheldon Richman February 25, 2015 If you find no other argument against American intervention abroad persuasive, how about this one? When the U.S. government invades and occupies other countries, or when it underwrites other governments' invasions or oppression, the people in the victimized societies become angry enough to want and even to exact revenge -- against Americans. Is the American empire worth that price? We should ask ...