Daily Articles

TGIF: The Phony Trade-off between Privacy and Security

by Sheldon Richman August 16, 2013

Most people take it for granted — because they’ve heard it so many times from politicians and pundits — that they must trade some privacy for security in this dangerous world. The challenge, we’re told, is to find the right “balance.” Let’s examine this. On its face the idea seems reasonable. I can imagine hiring a firm to look after ...

Stop-and-Frisk: How Government Creates Problems, Then Makes Them Worse

by Sheldon Richman August 14, 2013

Two recent law-enforcement decisions illustrate yet again that when government sets out to solve a problem it created, things get much worse. This week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department will keep nonviolent small-scale drug sellers who have no links to criminal organizations from getting caught in the mandatory-minimum-sentence trap. Under current law, judges must impose a ...

The Libertarian Angle: Drug War and Foreign Policy

by Future of Freedom Foundation August 12, 2013

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss the ongoing drug war and U.S. foreign policy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

TGIF: Truman, A-Bombs, and the Killing of Innocents

by Sheldon Richman August 9, 2013

Sixty-eight years ago today a president of the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a city full of innocent Japanese. It was the second time in three days that Harry Truman had done such a thing: He had bombed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The fatalities in the two cities totaled 150,000–246,000. The victims – mostly children, ...

How Ron Paul Changed My Heart and Mind on War

by Mike Marion August 9, 2013

My wife and I were in the middle of a three-month cross-country road trip in the fall of 2011. We had just driven for over three hours to a small community center in northwestern Iowa where I found myself shaking hands with a man who had transformed my thinking. I was nervous, and the only words I could get ...

The Calling: Bumper-Sticker Political Economy

by Steven Horwitz August 8, 2013

If you live in a college town, it’s almost a certainty that you’ve seen a bumper sticker along these lines: “Live simply so that others may simply live.” That phrase has the advantage of sounding like it’s based on some underlying economic theory as well as expressing a kind of moral superiority because of its concern for the least ...

The U.S. Empire Provokes Terrorism

by Sheldon Richman August 8, 2013

Perhaps we’ll never know if intercepted chatter between al-Qaeda leaders — which prompted the U.S. government to close dozens of diplomatic missions in the Muslim world and to issue a worldwide travel alert — was serious or not. But mischief shouldn’t be ruled out. Without cost or risk, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, head of ...

Gun Control and Drug Control

by Laurence M. Vance August 7, 2013

The Democratic attempt to enact additional or more draconian gun-control legislation is dead. Liberals in and out of Congress — many of whom would prefer that only members of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the police be armed — have lost the momentum they thought they had after the Sandy Hook school shooting last year in ...

California’s Move to Eliminate Private Schools

by Wendy McElroy August 6, 2013

California Senate Bill 131 is the latest volley in the political campaign against religious and private educational institutions, especially Catholic ones. SB 131 raises the current civil statute of limitations on damage lawsuits that are brought on the grounds of childhood sexual abuse. Under existing law, such a suit must be brought within 8 years of the child’s ...

JFK’s War With the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated, Part 1

by Douglas Horne August 5, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 Introduction I served on the staff of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) from August of 1995 through September of 1998, during the final three years of ...

The Libertarian Angle: Uncompromising Libertarianism

by Future of Freedom Foundation August 5, 2013

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss an uncompromising vision of the libertarian philosophy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

TGIF: Frédéric Bastiat and Subjective Marginal Utility

by Sheldon Richman August 2, 2013

In the 1870s economics took a radical turn in what is known as the “marginal revolution.” Whereas the classical economists, beginning with Adam Smith, cleaved use-value from exchange-value and thought in terms of the total utility and total supplies of goods, Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras realized that people act at the margin. They never choose ...