Daily Articles

Workplace Discrimination and a Free Society

by Laurence M. Vance December 16, 2013

Lately, it seems as though everyone thinks he is being discriminated against in the workplace. According to a national survey of employed American adults who were asked about their experiences with religious discrimination at work, “What American Workers Really Think about Religion: Tanenbaum’s 2013 Survey of American Workers and Religion,” More than half of employed Americans agree that there ...

TGIF: Will 2016 Be a Good Year for the Corporate State?

by Sheldon Richman December 13, 2013

If you share my belief that the major obstacle to the free society is the national-security/corporate state, 2016 is shaping up to be a year of apprehension. The Wall Streeters, who are among the biggest advocates of partnership between big government and big business, are looking forward to a presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie, a contest ...

A Review of “The Libertarian Angle Live”

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 11, 2013

In November Sheldon and I did a one-week tour of college campuses in the Southeast, traveling by car from Florida to North Carolina visiting local chapters of the Young Americans for Liberty. The YAL chapters we visited organized and hosted the events so all Sheldon and I had to do is arrive and share ideas on liberty. The audiences ...

Mandela Wasn’t Radical Enough

by Sheldon Richman December 11, 2013

I suppose we will forever be subjected to incomplete accounts of the life of Nelson Mandela and the evil he struggled against. Both the Right and the Left (as conventionally defined in America) are too busy pushing agendas to provide the full story. On the establishment Right (with some honorable exceptions) apartheid was deemed unimportant in the context of the ...

The Libertarian Angle: The Welfare State

by Future of Freedom Foundation December 9, 2013

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss welfare in the U.S. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

The CIA vs. Kennedy, Horman, and Teruggi

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 9, 2013

Ten years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, agents of General Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the 1973 military coup in Chile, took tens of thousands of people into custody, brutally tortured and raped them, and murdered some 3,000 of them. Their crime? They were all accused of believing in socialism or communism or of having supported the ...

TGIF: Crime and Punishment in a Free Society

by Sheldon Richman December 6, 2013

Would a free society be a crime-free society? We have good reason to anticipate it. Don’t accuse me of utopianism. I don’t foresee a future of new human beings who consistently respect the rights of others. Rather, I’m drawing attention to the distinction between crime and tort — between offenses against the state (or society) and offenses against individual persons ...

The Calling: Why I Defend Walmart

by Steven Horwitz December 5, 2013

In the aftermath of Black Friday (or now Thursday, I guess), much will be written about Walmart.  It remains the favorite whipping boy of many on the left, not to mention their enablers in what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Clerisy,” or what Hayek called “the second-hand dealers in ideas.”  More broadly, even those without strong left-leaning opinions often have ...

In Afghanistan, They Died for No Good Cause

by Sheldon Richman December 5, 2013

Last week a remarkable exchange about the future role of the U.S. military in Afghanistan took place on the MSNBC program Andrea Mitchell Reports. In a discussion of the U.S. government’s uncertain negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over the continued presence of U.S. troops beyond 2014, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, pointed out that, between the Karzai ...

The Nuclear Nudging of Your Food Choices

by Wendy McElroy December 3, 2013

In the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the “choice architect” Cass R. Sunstein describes his idea of “libertarian paternalism.” The paternalism aspect refers to “nudging” people in a desired direction, for example by putting photos of rotted lungs on cigarette packages. The libertarian aspect refers to not actually stripping people of the freedom to choose. ...

The Libertarian Angle: Minimum Wage and China

by Future of Freedom Foundation December 2, 2013

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman tackle the minimum wage and relations with China. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

Judge John R. Tunheim and the Presumed Innocence of Lee Harvey Oswald

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 2, 2013

In the run-up to the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim, not surprisingly, was in the news. He served as chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board during the 1990s. The ARRB had been established by Congress in the wake of the outcry among the American people resulting from the movie JFK in ...