Dress Codes and a Free Society by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2013 At first glance, the idea of dress codes seems foreign to a free society. Actually, however, the case is just the opposite. That truth was manifest most recently at, of all places, a press conference held at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, D.C., to announce the inauguration of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. As recounted ...
Obama, Union Buster? by Wendy McElroy May 1, 2013 Organized labor has been a bedrock of President Obama’s political power. How far will he go to preserve support from this key Democratic constituency? On April 16, the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers (UURWAW) became the first union to officially call for the repeal of Obama’s signature legislation — the Affordable Care Act, also known as ...
National Defense, Foreign Policy, and Gun Control by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2013 One of the most popular mantras in the post–9/11 era involves praising the troops for “defending our nation” and “protecting our rights and freedoms.” But how many people ever really think about what those mantras really mean? Indeed, how many people ever give serious thought to what would happen to our nation and to our rights and freedoms if ...
Venturing into Mali by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2013 Murray Rothbard once observed that it was getting harder and harder to use the reductio ad absurdum device to ridicule U.S. government policy. Things haven’t changed. Thanks to recent events, we may no longer use “Timbuktu,” a name associated with a far-off middle-of-nowhere location, in a reductio about U.S. interventionist foreign policy. The U.S. government has helped the French ...
How Drug-Courier Profiles Begot Terrorist Watch Lists by James Bovard May 1, 2013 Friends of freedom have been chagrined over the past decade to learn that federal terrorist watch lists incorporate criteria — such as openly praising the Constitution or the Second Amendment — that put them in the crosshairs. More than a million names are now included on the catch-all terrorist watch list maintained by U.S. government agencies. The feds’ definition ...
Who Killed Greece? by Anthony J. Papalas May 1, 2013 The Greek tragedy began in 1981 when PASOK, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party, won the national elections. Andreas Papandreou, who had been a member of the Greek Communist Party and had received his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard in 1942, founded and led PASOK. He had published significant scholarly works with a Keynesian slant and served as chairman of the ...
Food Safety: A Market Solution by Paul Schwennesen May 1, 2013 The FDA is trumpeting, with unseemly giddiness, sweeping implementation of new rules within the now thoroughly moldered food-safety bill, passed two long years ago. Like any dish served past its prime, this one smells a bit off. As a producer in the ascendant food renaissance (defined by a sudden respect for all things small and local) I’ve noticed a curious ...
Regulatory Herding, Regulatory Stampedes by Richard W. Fulmer May 1, 2013 Perfect storms occur when many factors align. Sandy was one of the most damaging hurricanes in the history of the United States, but it took the confluence of a number of elements to make it so. Under normal conditions the storm would have moved northeast, away from the U.S. coast. Instead, a high-pressure cold front forced Sandy to turn ...
Book Review: What Reality Teaches Us by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2013 No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails — But Individuals Succeed by John Stossel (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), 324 pages. John Stossel is the well-known host of Stossel on Fox Business. A graduate of Princeton, he has won an incredible 19 Emmy awards, is a five-time honoree for excellence in consumer reporting, and is a New York Times bestselling ...
Did President Obama “Radicalize” the Tsarnaevs? by Sheldon Richman April 30, 2013 If the Brothers Tsarnaev’s bombing at the Boston Marathon is an argument against immigration, then Tim McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is an argument against reproductive freedom. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev came to the United States from the Caucasus as youngsters. On what grounds should they have been barred from the country? That their family ...
The Prisoners Speak: Reports from the Hunger Strike in Guantánamo by Andy Worthington April 29, 2013 On Friday, I received an alarming message from inside Guantánamo, from a reliable source who described the impact of the prisonwide hunger strike, now nearing the three-month mark. He stated that the guards were “putting people in isolation and all day long making lots of noise by speaking loudly, running on the metal stairs and leaving their ...
TGIF: Liberty, Security, and Terrorism by Sheldon Richman April 26, 2013 “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” It would be nice if Benjamin Franklin’s famous aphorism were as widely believed as it is quoted. I doubt that Sen. Lindsey Graham and his ilk would express disagreement, but one cannot really embrace Franklin’s wisdom while also claiming that ...