Daily Articles

Time to Nullify the Drug Laws

by Sheldon Richman February 1, 2013

Thomas Jefferson said a revolution every 20 years would be a good thing. Regardless of what one thinks of that, perhaps a little constitutional crisis every now and then would have its benefits. One such crisis may be brewing now. On election day solid majorities of voters in Colorado and Washington voted to make marijuana a legal product not just ...

The Continuing Forfeiture Scourge

by James Bovard February 1, 2013

A federal crime wave is sweeping the nation, and prosecutors and G-men could not be happier about it. The Wall Street Journal reported that government “forfeiture programs confiscated homes, cars, boats, and cash in more than 15,000 cases . The total take topped $2.5 billion, more than doubling in five years, Justice Department statistics show.” Beginning in 1970, Congress ...

Taxi Tyranny

by Laurence M. Vance February 1, 2013

One of the most prevalent and persistent myths about the American economy is that it is based on the free market, or laissez-faire capitalism. True, when compared with much of the rest of the world, the United States appears to have a relatively free economy. The truth, however, is that in some sectors of the American economy, government intervention ...

Milking the Truancy Cow for Cash

by Wendy McElroy February 1, 2013

Diane Tran is a 17-year-old honor student who was jailed for truancy in Texas. When a tearful Tran gave an interview for a local television station, the story went viral. Her parents had recently divorced, leaving Tran to support herself and her siblings by working two jobs in addition to attending school. Fury was unleashed on the truancy court ...

Deflation, Liquidation, and Necessary Revisionism

by Tim Kelly February 1, 2013

During his ill-fated 1932 reelection campaign Herbert Hoover delivered a speech in which he said, In the midst of this hurricane the Republican administration kept a cool head, and it rejected every counsel of weakness and cowardice. Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until it had found its own bottom. ...

New Deal Utopianism

by George Leef February 1, 2013

Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning by C.J. Maloney (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2011), 292 pages. Drive south from Morgantown, West Virginia, and you soon come to the little town of Arthurdale. At the outskirts of town, there is a roadside plaque informing those who stop to read it that Arthurdale was ...

“Terrorism” and Lexical Warfare

by Wendy McElroy January 31, 2013

On December 22, 2012, the civil-rights organization called The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund posted a news item that read, FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and ...

The Ominous U.S. Presence in Northwest Africa

by Sheldon Richman January 31, 2013

Ominously but unsurprisingly, the U.S. military’s Africa Command wants to increase its footprint in northwest Africa. What began as low-profile assistance to France’s campaign to wrest control of northern Mali (a former colony) from unwelcome jihadists could end up becoming something more. The Washington Post reports that Africom “is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest ...

Fear Sells

by Rich Schwartzman January 31, 2013

There’s no way of knowing for certain how much ink, airtime, and bandwidth has been dedicated to the topic of firearms since the school shooting in Connecticut in December. Suffice it to say it’s been a huge amount. What’s come to the surface in the aftermath — once again — is an irrational fear of all things related to firearms. ...

Time to Can the Constitution?

by Michael Tennant January 30, 2013

Near the end of 2012, while Congress and the president were hashing out a deal to avert the “fiscal cliff,” Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman had this to say in a New York Times op-ed: As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of ...

Head Start, Food Stamps, and Libertarians

by Laurence M. Vance January 30, 2013

New reports were recently published about the effectiveness of two long-standing and familiar government programs: Head Start and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly and still informally known as food stamps. There is nothing unusual about that. Such reports are issued all the time by agencies in the government and organizations outside of it. Few ever read them, ...

Mali: Here We Go Again

by Sheldon Richman January 28, 2013

In testimony before Senate and House committees, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enthusiastically endorsed increased U.S. intervention in Africa. When government officials seem incapable of learning obvious lessons from the recent past, maybe their incentive is not to learn but to keep doing the same destructive things. President Obama’s inaugural speech contained this line, which has gone quite ...