Daily Articles

The Political Paternalists Take Aim at Milton Friedman

by Richard M. Ebeling June 28, 2021

The cancel culture movement has caught wide attention with its insistence on “cleansing” the country of persons, statues, building names, or any other public monument accused of being in any way tainted by or identified with American slavery or racism, past or present. This has served as a “cover” to delegitimize virtually anyone not aligned with or acquiescent to ...

Four Libertarian Principles to Guide Childcare Policy

by Laurence M. Vance June 25, 2021

Just as many conservatives believe that the federal government should have an education policy, so many conservatives believe that the federal government should have a childcare policy. A case in point was an event held last March by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) titled “Should Conservatives Favor Child Allowances?,” as well as a recent ...

The FBI’s Mafia-Style Justice: To Fight Crime, the FBI Sponsors 15 Crimes a Day

by John W. Whitehead June 21, 2021

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”— Friedrich Nietzsche Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. Think about it. Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. ...

The Labor Shortage Is a Government-Contrived Scarcity

by Richard M. Ebeling June 15, 2021

Not long ago, my wife and I decided to go out to our favorite Thai restaurant not far from our home in the Charleston, South Carolina area, which we had not been to for well over a year. With so many retail businesses having returned to a no-mask, no-distancing “normality,” we were looking forward to a tasty inside, sit-down ...

What Is Missing in the Arguments for Marijuana Legalization

by Laurence M. Vance June 14, 2021

The federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act with “a high potential for abuse,” “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States,” and “a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug under medical supervision.” The possession of even a small amount of marijuana can result in ...

Free Market Liberalism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

by Richard M. Ebeling June 9, 2021

The recent 11 days of warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has once more raised the issue of one-state or two-state “solutions” to the over seven decade Israel-Palestinian conflict. In the long run, neither is a viable option outside of a politics of individual liberty and an economics of free markets. There was a two-state solution laid out in ...

The Conservative Hypocrisy on Menthol Cigarette Ban

by Laurence M. Vance June 7, 2021

Many Americans perhaps don’t realize that Congress gave the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over tobacco in 2009.  Nor do they know that the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (TCA), enacted that same year, banned the sale of flavored tobacco products, with the exception of menthol-flavored cigarettes and flavored cigars. But by now, I suppose that ...

Make Way for the Snitch State

by John W. Whitehead June 3, 2021

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we ...

Inflation Is a Dangerous Way to Get Rid of Debt Burdens

by Richard M. Ebeling June 2, 2021

Suppose you lent someone $100, and when they paid you back they only handed you, say, $99 or $80. Would you consider the borrower to have kept his promise and contractual obligation? Or would you think that he had cheated you out of a part of the money you had lent him in good faith? Well, there are those ...

James Woolsey’s JFK Conspiracy Theory, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2021

Part 1 | Part 2 After the deadly fiasco at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, where Cuban communist forces defeated a CIA-sponsored invasion of the island, things went from bad to worse with respect to the relationship between Kennedy and the U.S. national-security establishment. Convinced that the United States could not survive with a communist outpost only 90 miles away from ...

Biden’s Rescue Act Targets Americans’ Freedoms

by James Bovard June 1, 2021

Since the 1800s, surly Americans have derided politicians for spending tax dollars “like drunken sailors.” Until recently, that was considered a grave character fault. But Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act shows that inebriated spending is now the path to national salvation. It was a common saying in America in the 1930s that “we cannot squander our way to prosperity.” ...

The Seven Deadly Sins of Government

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2021

What do King Solomon, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great), Dante Alighieri, and Mohandas Gandhi have to do with modern governments? Nothing, really, except that their emphasis on seven deadly evils provides us with the perfect pattern to categorize the deadly sins of government. “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him,” said King ...