Daily Articles

The Politics of Scandal

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1998

The hand-wringing over President Clinton's extracurricular activities is misplaced. Whatever else can be said about what Mr. Clinton did or didn't do, we can say this: it would be no tragedy if, as a result of the scandals, the presidency, indeed government itself, were diminished. Quite the contrary. Pundits and others have been heard to say that it is too ...

Clinton Tests Our Devotion to Liberty

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1998

President Clinton is up to something that will surely put the American people's love of liberty to the test. He wants to assign every citizen a "unique health identifier," an identification number that would permit the government to gather information about our health and compile it into a national database. No one noticed when ...

Eliminate, Don’t Reform, the IRS

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1998

Yet again a taxpayer "bill of rights" has been enacted into law. And so, after all the recent revelations of Internal Revenue Service abuse, we can all now be confident the tax collector will respect the rights and dignity of every American. Right. And pigs have started flying. We've been here before. ...

The Growing Farce of Fair Housing

by James Bovard July 1, 1998

In his masterpiece The Totalitarian Temptation, French socialist Jean-Franois Revel wrote, "There is a growing trend in the West to discount freedom as compared to justice." This trend is clear from the type of moral arrogance that congressmen and bureaucrats show in suppressing freedom in ...

Coerced Morality

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 1998

To relieve the suffering in the drought-stricken counties of Texas, Congress passed an appropriations bill, but it was vetoed by the president. In his veto message, the president stated: "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and ...

FDR – The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 3

by Ralph Raico July 1, 1998

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 Niccolò Machiavelli, the famous Renaissance political philosopher, had a ...

Book Review: Money and the Nation State

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 1998

Money and the Nation State edited by Kevin Dowd and Richard H. Timberlake Jr. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998); 453 pages; $24.95. For the entire 20th century, governments have fought a world war against gold as an international monetary standard. In its place, governments have imposed a system of monetary nationalism, with each government controlling and managing its own ...

Service without a Smile

by Sheldon Richman June 2, 1998

Stop the presses! Here's a news headline that will send shock waves through the nation: Compulsory community service doesn't work. Imagine that: When students are forced to be compassionate volunteers, they rebel and find ways to game the system. Who'd have believed it? In a recent article, James Youniss and Miranda Yates are crestfallen that ...

Closed Minds on Open Borders, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 1998

Part 1 | Part 2 Did you ever think you would see the day when the United States government would be forcing people into communism? Thirty years ago, the U.S. government sent 50,000 American men, many of whom had been conscripted, to their deaths in Southeast Asia. The purported reason: "We don't want the South Vietnamese to have to ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 18: Say’s Law of Markets and Keynesian Economics

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 1998

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 ...

No Third Way

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 1998

In his State of the Union address last winter, President Clinton declared that under his enlightened leadership, the United States had found the much sought-after "third way" between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. The remark was little noticed, but it was astounding nonetheless. One might have thought that the quest for the elusive third way had been dropped with the ...

Educational Gimmickry

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 1998

The coming controversy in the debate in education policy --actually, it's here already-will be over the matter of equal funding. In several states, the courts or legislatures have decided that it is unfair for communities with high-priced real estate to have better schools than communities with lower-priced real estate. ...