What Sequestration Should Really Look Like by Laurence M. Vance March 12, 2013 It’s official: sequestration has begun. Barack Obama has formally signed an order to put into effect the across-the-board government spending cuts known as “sequestration.” After failing to broker a deal at a meeting between Democratic (Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi) and Republican (John Boehner and Mitch McConnell) House and Senate leaders, the president told journalists, “Not everyone will ...
TGIF: Entrepreneurship and Social Cooperation by Sheldon Richman March 8, 2013 We may laud the market order as an indispensable arena for large-scale social cooperation, but let’s not forget that people cannot cooperate with one another if they don’t know that the potential for mutually beneficial exchanges exists. In the real world ignorance is pervasive, and we mustn’t fall prey to the mainstream economists’ unreal assumption that full knowledge about means, ends, ...
A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo by Andy Worthington March 8, 2013 When is a hunger strike not a hunger strike? Apparently, when the government says it doesn’t exist. At Guantánamo, reports first began to emerge on February 23 about a campwide hunger strike of a scale not seen since before Barack Obama became president. On the “Free Fayiz and Fawzi” page on Facebook, run by lawyers for
Cutting Government Would Boost Economy by Sheldon Richman March 7, 2013 Budget sequestration is as modest a step toward cutting Leviathan as one can imagine. Further progress will be difficult as long as people believe that slashing the size of government conflicts with reviving the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. In his recent debate on Charlie Rose, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul ...
Obama: Dictator or Monarch? by Wendy McElroy March 7, 2013 As part of his strategy of shifting blame for the sequester onto Republicans, President Obama told reporters that his hands were politically tied. He stated, “I am not a dictator, I’m the president.” In other words, he could not bypass Congress to unilaterally impose his will. And yet this is precisely what Obama has been doing for years. He has ...
More Reflections on the JFK Assassination by Tim Kelly March 7, 2013 Despite the mounds of evidence indicating that President John F. Kennedy was the victim of an elaborate conspiracy organized by elements of the national-security state, there are many who still believe the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. A partial explanation for this could be ignorance. Many are simply not aware of the difficulties in the ...
Self-Defense and the Anti-Gun Mentality, Part 2 by Scott McPherson March 6, 2013 Part 1 | Part 2 I’ve been having a friendly back-and-forth with a friend of mine over the issue of guns, self-defense, and the Second Amendment for several weeks now. After sending him my latest FFF commentary, he responded that he didn’t hate guns, as I had suggested. “I just want to live in a ...
Kill Anything That Moves by Ken Sturzenacker March 6, 2013 If you were looking at a thousand men walking around on a football field, dressed very much alike, jeans and T-shirts with no markings, could you tell the Democrats from the Republicans, or the registered independents from the ones simply not registered to vote? Not likely. Neither could the smartest people in the Pentagon from the early 1960s through 1975 tell ...
The Libertarian Angle: March 4, 2013 (Video) by Future of Freedom Foundation March 5, 2013 The Libertarian Angle features FFF vice president Sheldon Richman and president Jacob Hornberger. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.
Timbuktu Not out of Reach of U.S. Troops by Laurence M. Vance March 5, 2013 Although it is a real city north of the Niger River on edge of the Sahara Desert in the West African country of Mali, Timbuktu has long served as a metaphor for an exotic, mysterious, and distant land. To travel from “here to Timbuktu” suggests a long, arduous, and adventurous journey to a place far away. Timbuktu has both economic ...
TGIF: Sequestration and the Chimera of the Informed Voter by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2013 I spent too much time and effort this week trying to figure out the budget implications of sequestration. This made me wonder how many, well, normal people would be willing to do that. If the answer is “not many,” then in what sense can we talk about the “informed voter”? And if the “informed voter” is a chimera, how ...
Why Was JFK Assassinated? by Tim Kelly March 1, 2013 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has joined the ranks of skeptics and “conspiracy theorists” who believe that a lone gunman was not solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy said his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, believed the Warren Commission Report was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship” “The evidence at this point I ...