Daily Articles

Killing Iraqi Children

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 19, 2006

In a short editorial, the Detroit News asked an interesting question: “Some war critics are suggesting Iraq terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi should have been arrested and prosecuted rather than bombed into oblivion. Why expose American troops to the danger of an arrest, when bombs work so well?” Here’s one possible ...

Is This Really War?

by Sheldon Richman June 16, 2006

In 1985, Wilson Goode became the first U.S. mayor to bomb his own city. In an effort to rid a West Philadelphia neighborhood of a ragtag, violent, back-to-nature organization called Move, which had engaged in a shootout with police, Goode ordered explosives dropped on the Move house from a helicopter. ...

Zarqawi and the Drug War

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 12, 2006

After several consecutive months of bad news for U.S. officials — the Marine massacre at Haditha, the disclosure of secret CIA renditions and torture camps in former Soviet-bloc countries, the weekly deaths of American troops, and the daily kidnappings, beheadings, and suicide bombs in Baghdad — U.S. officials and pro-occupation supporters received a big ...

Iraqi Death by Political Abstraction

by Sheldon Richman June 5, 2006

Try as they might, apologists for the war in Iraq wont be convincing when they insist that, at worst, the Haditha incident (or was it a mishap?) was the unfortunate work of a few bad Marines. It was something much worse. When men trained to kill on a battlefield this wasnt the Salvation Army, after all are ordered into civilian ...

The Cowardice of the Conservative

by Scott McPherson June 2, 2006

Conservatives are an interesting bunch. In a desperate attempt to differentiate themselves from liberals, they like to mock folks on the Left while talking as if they themselves were in agreement with libertarians. “I just vote Republican because they’re the lesser of two evils” is a common excuse for their continued support of that ...

Independent Migrants Have Rights Too

by Sheldon Richman June 2, 2006

You’d never know it from the recent public discussion, but the people disparaged as “illegal aliens” — in fact they are independent migrants — have the same natural rights to life, liberty, and property that Americans have. As long as they violate no one else’s natural rights, they should be free ...

Do Hadithans Hate Us for Our Freedoms?

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 2, 2006

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. officials announced that the terrorists were motivated by anger and hatred for American “freedoms and values.” In other words, the terrorists hated the First Amendment and rock and roll and, therefore, decided to attack our country. When asked whether U.S. foreign policy might have anything ...

Liberty, Power, and the Constitution

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2006

A few years ago, I was delivering a lecture on the Constitution to an assembly consisting of a couple hundred high-school students. I made the following observation, which threw the students into an uproar: “The First Amendment to the Constitution does not give people the right to free speech.” Immediately, I was pummeled by criticisms from all across the ...

Libertarian Class Analysis

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 2006

Say the words “class analysis” or “class conflict” and most people will think of Karl Marx. The idea that there are irreconcilable classes, their conflict inherent in the nature of things, is one of the signatures of Marxism. That being the case, people who want nothing to do with Marxism quite naturally want nothing to do with class analysis. So ...

Killing in the Name of Democracy

by James Bovard June 1, 2006

President George W. Bush perpetually invokes the goal of spreading democracy to sanctify his foreign policy. Unfortunately, he is only the latest in a string of presidents who cloaked aggression in idealistic rhetoric. Killing in the name of democracy has a long and sordid history. The U.S. government’s first experience with forcibly spreading democracy came in the wake of the ...

Housing Socialism, Part 1

by Gregory Bresiger June 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 In every country examined, the introduction and continuance of rent control/restriction has done much more harm than good in rental housing markets — let alone the economy at large — by perpetuating shortages, encouraging immobility, swamping consumer preferences, fostering dilapidation of housing ...

Public Schools Have Flunked Out

by James Ervin Norwood June 1, 2006

Public schools are brain dead and on life support; so let’s pull the plug on them, give them a decent funeral, and let better alternatives take root and flourish. Education is what we must save and regenerate, not an obsolete proven flop that has been in a persistent counterproductive condition for decades. The time has come to slaughter a sacred ...