Daily Articles

How I Learned Not to Shovel

by James Bovard February 1, 2014

The Obama administration has touted government jobs and training programs as one of the solutions to America’s high unemployment rate. Such programs can teach young people invaluable lessons — especially about the unreliability of political promises to provide kids with valuable skills. I learned a lot about the nature of government work during the summer I spent on the ...

Corporatism as Theory and Practice

by Joseph R. Stromberg February 1, 2014

When I first discovered corporatism, about 1966, it was not exactly a household word. The term was known only to specialists, who mostly looked for it in the recent (pre–1945) past. Between about 1960 and the early 1970s, a few New Left and libertarian scholars stirred up greater (but still quite small) interest in this arcane term. My original ...

How the Castle Crumbled

by Matthew Harwood February 1, 2014

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko (Public Affairs 2013), 400 pages. “A man’s home is his castle,” the old English saying goes. Since the American Revolution, Americans’ homes have been considered sanctified space. Under the Castle Doctrine, first expressed in English common law, a person’s home — whether it’s a shack or ...

Should Unemployment Benefits Be Extended?

by Laurence M. Vance January 31, 2014

Since December of last year, Democrats in the Senate have once again been pushing to extend unemployment benefits that had already been extended many times. Senate Republicans are not opposed on principle, just on how the extended benefits should be paid for, along with some minor details and procedural issues. The question that no one in the Senate ...

Obama and Kerry Jeopardize Peace with Iran

by Sheldon Richman January 30, 2014

Barack Obama and John Kerry should make up their minds: Do they want war or peace with Iran? We should hope for peace, but Obama and Kerry make optimism difficult. Ideally, the Obama administration would simply exit the Middle East, taking all its military and economic aid with it. The U.S. government cannot micromanage events there, especially ...

The Libertarian Angle: Gun Control

by Future of Freedom Foundation January 27, 2014

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss the recent shooting a Maryland mall and the ensuing calls for gun control. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

TGIF: Warfare/Welfare/Corporate State: All of a Piece

by Sheldon Richman January 24, 2014

If I understand Princeton historian Sean Wilentz correctly, progressives ought not to be grateful to Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Glenn Greenwald for exposing government spying because they are not card-carrying progressives. (“Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought?”) Apparently they have either hung out with libertarians, praised or ...

Everybody Is Asking Me For Money

by James Glaser January 22, 2014

It was decades ago that I was in the Carpenters Union, and that connection must be the reason I get money requests from Democratic Party candidates.  I don’t know why the Republicans hit me up too because I am a registered Independent. As I think about it, there’s probably not one charity that hasn’t solicited funds from ...

The Libertarian Angle: Obama and the NSA

by Future of Freedom Foundation January 21, 2014

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss the President Obama's planed "reform" of the NSA. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

The Surveillance State Lives

by Sheldon Richman January 21, 2014

President Obama has some nerve. He opened his speech on NSA spying by likening his surveillance regime to Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty. How insulting! They were helping people resist government tyranny, and the British spied on them to put down the coming rebellion. In sizing up Obama’s “reforms” of the indiscriminate gathering of data on ...

TGIF: Rights Violations Aren’t the Only Bads

by Sheldon Richman January 17, 2014

More than a few libertarians appear to hold the view that only rights violations are wrong, bad, and deserving of moral condemnation. If an act does not entail the initiation of force, so goes this attitude, we can have nothing critical to say about it. On its face, this is strange. If you observe an adult being rude to his ...

The Eighteenth Amendment and the War on Drugs

by Laurence M. Vance January 16, 2014

For more than 40 years now the U.S. government has been waging its War on Drugs. After declaring drug abuse to be “America’s public enemy number one” and “a national emergency,” Richard Nixon employed military rhetoric as he launched his war on individual liberty, personal freedom, and private property, calling for a “full-scale attack” on drug abuse “on many ...