Daily Articles

Texas Inventories Children

by Wendy McElroy September 4, 2012

Officials at Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas, apparently view George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale. Over 6,000 students will be required to carry microchipped ID so that the district can track their movements in school and on school buses. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips will be embedded in ...

Medicare Is Doomed

by Sheldon Richman September 3, 2012

When Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to “end Medicare as we know it,” they are right. But Democrats do too. “Medicare as we know it” is no longer an option. Leaving aside Medicare’s fatal moral defect — that it’s coercively funded — the program is doomed. It has tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities. It threatens working generations ...

The Supreme Court’s Word Game Saves Obamacare

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2012

The Supreme Court decision upholding the health-insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) had a distinct Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it. As Lewis Carroll wrote in Through the Looking-Glass, “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Chief Justice ...

The Federal Wetlands War, Part 3

by James Bovard September 1, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 As the first two parts of this series revealed, federal bureaucrats have been using environmental pretexts to rampage against property owners since the late 1980s. Unfortunately, even after the Republicans took over Congress in 1994 and promised sweeping reforms, the outrages continued. A recent Supreme Court decision vivified that, despite ...

Is Social Security Welfare?

by Laurence M. Vance September 1, 2012

Since the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare became the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services in 1979, the term “welfare” has fallen into disuse. “Income security,” “entitlement,” or “public assistance programs” are now the usual terms for what used to be called “welfare programs.” Even the food-stamp program has been renamed the Supplemental ...

Reflections on the Torture Debate

by Joseph Margulies September 1, 2012

What remains to be said of the torture debate? I asked myself this question because March 28 was an anniversary of sorts. On that date 10 years ago the United States cast the first person into a CIA black site. In time, he was subjected to each and every one of the Bush administration’s “enhanced” techniques. Waterboarding, of which ...

Book Review: The U.S. War Machine

by Anthony Gregory September 1, 2012

The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril by Eugene Jarecki (New York: Free Press, 2008); 336 pages. Many supporters of Barack Obama are disappointed that he has not reversed the war policies of his predecessor. He did his best to continue the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The Afghanistan war rages far beyond what ...

Crisis Response

by Tim Kelly August 30, 2012

The fiscal and monetary response by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to the economic crisis has been to spend, to borrow, and to inflate the money supply. The result has been skyrocketing debt, continued economic stagnation, and monetary conditions conducive to hyperinflation. Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in the fall of 2008, supposedly to avert ...

Prison Inservitude

by Wendy McElroy August 29, 2012

The United States Constitution recognizes American prisons as forced-labor camps. The Thirteenth Amendment, enacted in 1865 to outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude, includes an exception. It reads, Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their ...

Social Insecurity

by Laurence M. Vance August 28, 2012

The six-member Board of Trustees of Social Security has released its 72nd annual report on the state of Social Security: “The 2012 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds.” The Social Security Act of 1935 requires that the board report annually to Congress on the ...

Don’t Call for an Ambulance

by Laurence M. Vance August 21, 2012

The two recent high-profile and highly deadly shootings in the United States have been the occasion of much dialogue about “gun control.” Liberals, predictably, have generally called for more and stricter gun-control laws. Conservatives, to their credit, have generally argued to the contrary (even though they have accepted decades of various federal gun-control laws that make a mockery of the ...

The Paul Ryan Selection

by Tim Kelly August 15, 2012

The mainstream media is abuzz with the news of Mitt Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate. Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget Committee and has earned a reputation as a “budget hawk” and advocate of limited government by being the architect of a highly touted plan that would supposedly slash federal ...