Daily Articles

Terrorism Déjà Vu in Saudi Arabia

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 14, 2003

Monday’s terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia brings to mind the words of the famous New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” During the 1980s, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was a friend and ally of the U.S. government, even to the extent that our own government authorized the delivery of weapons of ...

Leave Bill Bennett Alone

by Scott McPherson May 9, 2003

Public revelations of former drug czar William J. Bennett’s penchant for high-stakes gambling has produced immediate reform for the Book of Virtues author: “It is true that I have gambled large sums of money.... I have done too much gambling, and this is not an example I wish to set. ...

Short-Sighted Bush

by Sheldon Richman May 9, 2003

Advocates of big government sometimes say that politicians are superior to business people because the latter are shortsighted: they only care about the next quarter’s balance sheet. This was always nonsense, because while business has strong incentives to look farther up the road, politicians have little incentive to look beyond the next election. It turns out that ...

For Love of the State

by Scott McPherson May 9, 2003

On April 25, the Washington Times ran a front-page story titled, Ashcroft asserts right to hold illegals, Says indefinite detentions aids security. And, with a taste for irony that couldnt possibly have been intentional, the Times ran an op-ed on the same day, by Jerome Cohen of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jared Genser, president of Freedom Now, titled ...

Backpedaling on Iraqi Weapons

by Sheldon Richman May 3, 2003

The campaign of deception continues, but the handwriting is on the wall. President Bush himself now says that so-called weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq. But hes not yet willing to concede that perhaps Saddam Hussein was telling the truth when he said he had none. ...

Joining the Ranks of Aggressor Nations

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 2, 2003

It really doesn’t matter whether U.S. military forces now find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or not. From a moral standpoint, it’s too late for that. As everyone knows, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush provided several justifications for the invasion, and people were ...

Economic Liberty and the Constitution, Part 12

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2003

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 |  Table of Contents Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in ...

An American Empire! If You Want It instead of Freedom, Part 2

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2003

Part 1 | Part 2 Also making a case for an imperial role for the United States is Deepak Lal, professor of international development studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lal has long been a leading opponent of central planning and regulation in developing countries and a strong advocate of free markets and competition. On October 30, ...

Concentric Circles

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2003

Libertarians are always happy to get noticed in the mainstream media. It happens so seldom. But not all attention is good attention, even when it’s sympathetic. Susan Lee, of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, teaches this lesson in her article on the newspaper’s editorial page of February 12. Ominously titled “Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll,” Lee’s article pays ...

Bush at War

by James Bovard May 1, 2003

This article was posted March 5, 2003. Bob Woodward, the famed Watergate investigator and now a senior editor at the Washington Post, was granted unprecedented access to George W. Bush and to some of the top players in his administration in the wake of September 11. The result is a new book — ...

Free-Market Environmentalism

by Bart Frazier May 1, 2003

One of the most important lessons that economics teaches is that incentives matter. Economics is not a field that is normally associated with the environmental movement, but the recognition of the importance of incentives has led to a schism in the movement between those environmentalists who turn to the state to protect the environment and those who instead rely ...

Étienne de La Boétie, Part 2

by Wendy McElroy May 1, 2003

Part 1 | Part 2 The beginning of a tyrant’s rule was the most difficult period because those who had not consented to his rule would obey reluctantly, and brute force might be necessary. Brute force could put down dissent in the short term but it was never a good option. Violence bred martyrs, it increased popular resistance against ...