Daily Articles

Liberty Creates Order

by Sheldon Richman May 8, 2009

David Brooks, the New York Times’s resident neoconservative, delights in peddling a false alternative: freedom or social order. His latest column hawking this snake oil comes in the form of advice to the struggling Republican Party: “If the Republicans are going to rebound, they will have to reestablish themselves as the ...

U.S. Foreign Policy Caused the Taliban Problem

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 8, 2009

U.S. officials are now concerned not only with a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan but also a Taliban takeover in Pakistan. These problems, however, were caused by the U.S. Empire itself. While most Americans now view President Bush’s Iraq War as a “bad war,” the common perception is that Bush’s invasion ...

Obama Returns to Bush Era on Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington May 4, 2009

Two distressing pieces of news emerged last week regarding the Obama administration’s plans to close Guantánamo, and both were delivered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Discussing what would happen to the remaining 241 prisoners, Gates announced that the question was “still open” as to what the government should do with “the 50 to ...

Gold and Freedom, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 The Framers had experienced the ravages of paper money during the Revolutionary War and under the Articles of Confederation, and they were fully aware of how governments had plundered and looted their own citizenry with inflation throughout history. Therefore, the Framers used the Constitution to ensure ...

Bipartisan “Stimulus” Hypocrisy

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2009

The cynicism and shallowness of politics were abundantly displayed throughout the debate over the “stimulus” bill. The Obama administration and its allies in Congress see themselves as champions of democracy, yet the process by which the bill was rammed through Congress flouted the democratic spirit. The final bill was nearly ...

The Post–9/11 Roundup of Innocents, Part 1

by James Bovard May 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 Many Americans have been lulled into a false sense of security by the end of the George W. Bush administration. In reality, the government continues to pose grave perils to people’s rights and liberties. And it could take only one shocking incident for the government to once again show its heavy-handed ways. Prior to the ...

The Fallacies of Another New Deal, Part 3

by William L. Anderson May 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Historians want us to believe that Franklin Roosevelt had nothing to do with causing the massive unemployment and World War II that came in the wake of the Great Depression. Instead, they tell us that Roosevelt simply did the best he could with the hand which he was dealt. No doubt, ...

The Fallacy of Equal Pay for Equal Work

by Glenn Jacobs May 1, 2009

We’ve all heard the phrase “equal pay for equal work.” Many of those who habitually repeat this mantra may not realize that it is simply a variation of the discredited labor theory of value (LTV), which is generally associated with Marxian economics. According to the LTV, the value of a product is related to the labor needed ...

The Justice of Pay Discrimination

by Michael Tennant May 1, 2009

Recently the upstairs toilet in my house backed up. Unable to budge the clog, my wife called a plumber, who replaced both the seal and some of the inner workings of the toilet. Let’s say, just for the sake of this example, that the plumber charged us $200 for the repair. Now suppose the next day the downstairs toilet had needed ...

Selling Short the Short-Seller

by Gregory Bresiger May 1, 2009

It happens every financial crash. Or in every prolonged bear market. Or almost any time things go bad in the financial markets. An evil person must be found. Oftentimes, the scapegoat is the short-seller. Today the short-seller is like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. It’s ...

A Free Market in Labor

by George Leef May 1, 2009

Labor Economics from a Free Market Perspective: Employing the Unemployable by Walter Block (World Scientific, 2008); 393 pages. The first time I ever heard of Walter Block was in 1980, when a faculty colleague showed me his copy of Block’s book Defending the Undefendable. Knowing of my anarcho-capitalist views, my colleague said ...

FDR’s Social Security Paradox

by Jim Powell April 30, 2009

If Social Security is so wonderful, why were people forced to participate, why was it set up as a monopoly, and why did it dump ever-larger costs onto the backs of future generations? There never was a popular demand for Social Security, even during the Great Depression. Few Americans were ...