Daily Articles

Zoning’s Attack on Liberty and Property

by Bart Frazier October 1, 2006

One of the most coercive tools that public officials have at their disposal is zoning. City councils and county boards throughout the country use zoning regulations to dictate which uses are permitted and which are not on every parcel of land within their jurisdiction. While sometimes well-intentioned, zoning regulations nevertheless ...

Monopolies Versus the Free Market, Part 2

by Gregory Bresiger October 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 Why do some think that successful firms are inherently evil? Why do many antitrust regulators actually believe that any firms that report consistently high profits should be under review by government officials? One part of the regulatory argument is ...

Lies and Myths about Opiates

by Randal Cousins October 1, 2006

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy by Theodore Dalrymple (New York: Encounter Books, 2006); 146 pages; $21.95. This is a hugely important book. If it gets sufficient attention, it could be a major landmark in the ongoing campaign to introduce truth into the honesty-challenged issue of recreational drugs. Although written very much from a conservative point of ...

Outsourcing Torture

by Sheldon Richman September 29, 2006

If you want to see the bare essence of the Bush administration, behold its policy of “rendition.” The innocuous-sounding word signifies a policy under which American officials send terrorist suspects — detainees never convicted of crimes — to countries where they will be tortured, keeping the U.S. government’s hands clean of the monstrous treatment. Can ...

Decimating the Constitution with Military Tribunals

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 27, 2006

Given all the glorification being bestowed on three U.S. senators for displaying “principle” in standing against President Bush’s plan to amend the Geneva Convention to permit torture of detainees, followed by their quick compromise abandoning any semblance of principle, it is easy to lose sight of something much bigger: The military tribunals that the ...

The United States of Barbarism

by James Bovard September 25, 2006

The U.S. Senate is cutting a deal with President Bush to make America a banana republic. Last week, three senators reached an agreement with the White House that will de facto permit the CIA to continue torturing people around the world. And the deal will prevent anyone — including Bush administration officials — from being ...

No Immigration Trouble at the Check-Out Counter

by Scott McPherson September 22, 2006

To hear anti-immigrant types and their spokesmen tell it, any intelligent American only needs to look around to see all the trouble that immigrants cause us. A heterogeneous society just won’t work, they say. Too many problems with language differences and clashing cultures. And then there’s the burden on the ...

What Crisis?

by Scott McPherson September 18, 2006

According to the Washington Post, there’s a new crisis brewing in American health care. Not one related to rising costs, substandard service, rationing of services, or any other problem stemming from government’s micro-management of the health-care field, but rather one involving an alleged conflict of consciences. A story in the July 16 issue of ...

Bush’s Evasion

by Sheldon Richman September 15, 2006

Five years after 9/11, as things increasingly sour in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush’s public appearances get increasingly more pathetic. During Bush’s August news conference a persistent reporter wouldn’t let him get away with his claim that Iraq is the central front on the so-called war on terror. “What did Iraq ...

A Real Free Market Benefits Workers

by Sheldon Richman September 6, 2006

Hands are wringing over bleak reports that despite increased productivity, workers are falling behind: real median income — adjusted for government-caused inflation — is said to be falling. Meanwhile, corporate profits are skyrocketing, and the wealthiest are doing fine. In other words, the benefits of economic growth are said to ...

The Federal War on Gold, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized the monetary system of the United States and set the nation on the road of inflationary plunder that has characterized other nations in history. The actions of these two presidents also provide a textbook example for understanding the animosity and antipathy that ...

Beware Income-Tax Casuistry, Part 2

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The United States got its first income tax during the War Between the States, again demonstrating that war harms ordinary people in more ways than militarily. During any war government becomes an especially voracious consumer of the people’s resources and dissent is stifled or suppressed. So it is ...