Young People Aren’t Skeptical Enough! by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2001 Nearly everyone seems to agree on one thing: young people are tragically skeptical about politics. The subject came up in the third debate between Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush, both of whom bemoaned the political disillusionment of the young. Minnesota’s governor, Jesse Ventura, constantly ...
The Marc Rich Pardon by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2001 "Everybody's upset with former President Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, the financier who had been indicted by a New York grand jury under former U.S. Attorney Rudy Guliani for buying and selling oil at the wrong price and with the wrong country and for not paying taxes on the profits. Okay, ...
Bring Back the Deficit! by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2001 Should we cut taxes or should we pay off the national debt? What’s missing from this picture? Aside from the fact that paying off the debt need not be a priority (there is no connection between the debt and economic growth), the question is a classic case of the Fallacy of ...
Why Not Abolish the Nonessentials? by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2001 The pomp and ceremony surrounding George W. Bush’s nomination of new department heads is now complete. The discussion and debate now center around the qualifications of each of the new nominees. But who is asking the crucial question: Rather than appointing the best-qualified people to run the various ...
Clinton’s Kosovo Frauds by James Bovard January 1, 2001 AS AMERICANS DEBATE what President Clinton’s legacy should be, too little attention is given to his remarks on Kosovo. The United States launched a war against a European nation largely at Clinton’s behest. Clinton’s war against Serbia epitomized his moralism, his arrogance, his refusal to respect law, and his fixation on proving his virtue ...
Young People Aren’t Skeptical Enough! by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2001 NEARLY EVRYONE seems to agree on one thing: young people are tragically skeptical about politics and reluctant to participate. Various reasons are posited for this state of affairs. Republicans say it is because the Clinton administration has been dishonest the last eight years, and they called for a change at the polls. The Democrats, along with Sen. John McCain ...
The Second Amendment Protects an Individual Right by Benedict D. LaRosa January 1, 2001 THERE IS A popular misconception that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution refers to a collective right rather than an individual right. Both history and reason argue against this misinterpretation. The right to self- (and collective) defense does not originate with, nor is it dependent upon, the Second Amendment. Man has ...
$44,000 Traffic Ticket by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2001 "Perhaps we should periodically count our blessings here in the United States. From a recent Associated Press article : 'A dot.com millionaire said he is fighting a huge traffic fine--reportedly $44,100--for driving dangerously. On a recent spin through downtown Helsinki, Jaakko Rytsola, 27, switched lanes too often and endangered other ...
Morals and the Welfare State, Part 4 by F.A. Harper January 1, 2001 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ISN’T IT a strange thing that if you select any three fundamentally moral persons and combine them into a collective for the doing of good, they are liable at once to become three immoral persons in their collective ...
Book Review: Feeling Your Pain by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2001 Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years by James Bovard (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); 426 pages; $26.95. WHEN THE HISTORY of the last decade of the 20th century is written sometime in the future, chroniclers of the 1990s will probably, at first, be tempted to emphasize the apparent triumphs of freedom around ...
Reflections on Liberty at Christmastime by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2000 ONE OF THE biggest differences between Christian statists and Christian libertarians concerns the role of the state in matters pertaining to morality. Christian statists believe that the state should be God’s partner who ensures, through fines and imprisonment, that people follow the correct moral path. Christian libertarians, on ...
Your Vote Doesn’t Count by Sheldon Richman December 1, 2000 I have followed the presidential election returns pretty closely, and for the life of me, I cannot find a single state where George W. Bush and Al Gore were tied or where the margin victory was one vote. This is important because everyone from President Clinton to the most obscure news anchorperson has repeated incessantly that this election proves once ...