Cannabis / Marijuana
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May 17, 2015
Obviously, drug cases have had a huge impact on me because they are victimless crimes and they oftentimes carry mandatory minimum sentences along with them. Sometimes they're ridiculously long, outrageously immoral mandatory minimum sentences. I think it is an ...
May 16, 2015
There have been lots of complaints about governments sticking their fingers into school curricula... and the people complaining have been right; setting knowledge free from the state was the key to its growth. We'll cover the story this week. … Chapter Three: ...
May 15, 2015
The pursuit of freedom means more than escaping the government. True freedom requires independence – the state of "not depending" on outside help. In an advanced economy, very few people can claim to be fully independent. We all depend on each other to meet v ...
May 15, 2015
GDP purports to measure economic activity while largely divorcing itself from the quality, profitability, depth, breadth, improvement, advancement, and rationalization of goods and services provided. For example, even if a ship – built at great expense – ...
May 14, 2015
If anyone needs another reason to hate the federal income tax and the agency that enforces it, this is a good one. The IRS bans marijuana sellers from deducting most business expenses, even though they are operating in full compliance with all state and local l ...
May 14, 2015
One of the most amazing aspects of Ron Paul's twin presidential campaigns was the way they brought together people who, on the surface, attached themselves to many different political labels. I met wonderful people who identified as conservative, liberal, liber ...
May 14, 2015
Four years ago the late great journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote, "Alas, the actual story of 'our history' is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America's superior moral worth." It so happens he wrote that sentence in ...
May 13, 2015
Evolutionary biologists tells us that humanity itself came from Africa. Now that continent may be leading the world back toward honest money. The EcoCash concept doesn't seem to offer a full escape from fractional reserve banking. The fact that accounts earn in ...
May 13, 2015
How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)? Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some court or p ...
May 12, 2015
Faux transparency is a favorite tool of entrenched bureaucratic institutions. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's 1980s "Glasnost" is one example. The idea is to divert resistance into a box where it can vent its frustrations without forcing any real change. Ofte ...
May 12, 2015
Old fallacies never seem to die, they just fade away to reemerge once again later on. One such fallacy is that if there is significant unemployment and slow economic growth it must be due to not enough consumers' spending in the economy, what Keynesian economis ...
May 11, 2015
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to free speech. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. Two centuries later, these rights are colliding. What will we see when the smoke clears? The Framers wisely placed ...
May 11, 2015
This week the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA's metadata collection program was not authorized in US law. The PATRIOT Act, under which the program began, was too vague, the court found. But the truth is the Act was intended to be vague so that ...
May 09, 2015
Any freedom advocate has to be amazed by the fact that millions of people seem emotionally bound to their abusers. Today, we'll explain how that began and uncover its roots. Continued from last week… THE GREAT TRADE. During the years between 5400 and 3000 B. ...
May 08, 2015
These two court cases in the same week illustrate the maddening distinctions and hurdles that stand between citizens and any semblance of privacy. The first case involved a criminal conviction made with the help of phone location data given to law enforcement b ...
May 07, 2015
Once again, NYT misses the point. Yes, Federal Reserve leaks are bad. Authorities should identify the leakers and deal with them. But here is the bigger question: Why is Federal Reserve information so valuable? Fed officials from Janet Yellen on down maintain t ...
May 07, 2015
Much of the commentary on the rioting and torching of Baltimore resides within the predictable Red-versus-Blue dichotomy: Republicans blame the Welfare State, fatherless teenagers, a lack of self-responsibility. They dismiss the rioters as thugs and imply that ...
May 06, 2015
In theory, profit-seeking colleges ought to deliver better service at a lower price than state-run institutions. Some probably do, but a tangled web of political influence and regulatory interference makes it hard to know. The Corinthian College's bankruptcy fi ...
May 06, 2015
“In a democratic society,” observed Oakland police chief Sean Whent, “people have a say in how they are policed.” Unfortunately, if you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully ...
May 06, 2015
Washington continues to drive Europe toward one or the other of the two most likely outcomes of the orchestrated conflict with Russia. Either Europe or some European Union member government will break from Washington over the issue of Russian sanctions, thereby ...
May 05, 2015
If you've been dying to know whether the Chinese yuan was at fair value, you can finally rest easy. The IMF says it's almost there. This leaves another question, though. By what authority does the International Monetary Fund decide a currency's value is "fair" ...
May 05, 2015
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke before a joint session of the U.S. Congress on April 29, 2015 and offered his "eternal condolences to the souls of all American people that were lost during World War II," but never directly said that he was sorry for Im ...
May 04, 2015
Ask a traditional small-government conservative to define government's appropriate role, and most will list police as a necessary function. We need them to maintain order and stop evildoers. Yet history shows that societies around the globe managed to maintain ...
May 04, 2015
Apologists for the National Security Agency (NSA) point to the arrest of David Coleman Headley as an example of how warrantless mass surveillance is necessary to catch terrorists. Headley played a major role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack that killed 166 p ...
May 02, 2015
Surveillance is nothing new. In fact, it goes back some seven thousand years. Then, as now, it quietly destroyed productive modes of life. Furthermore, it was fundamental in setting one class of people (rulers) above all other people (the ruled). This two-class ...
May 02, 2015
The story of Robert Bates has covered the news wire for the past two weeks. A sting gone bad, with a "pay for play" volunteer reserve officer fatally shooting the subdued suspect. These facts have been known for some time, along with the details of the sting: a ...
May 01, 2015
Politicians like Al Gore have made millions whipping crowds into a frenzy over "Climate Change," the newer term for what they once called "Global Warming." Whether or not one believes the world is in peril, fossil fuels are certainly not pleasant. No one enjoys ...
May 01, 2015
GMO opponents have claimed for years that ubiquitous GMO produce such as corn and soy may have detrimental effects on our health. And in 2013, a group of researchers set out to prove it. The peer-reviewed study, which was published in the Journal of Organic Sys ...
April 30, 2015
The program described in this article is one of the less-intrusive dragnets Edward Snowden exposed, but it is nonetheless unacceptable. Supposedly, it does not give the government the content of phone calls, only the "metadata" such as date, time, location, num ...
April 30, 2015
If you value privacy and want to encrypt your cellphone to keep hackers and other snoops from rifling through your personal business then you are aiding terrorists. At least that's what the top prosecutor in New York City said recently when discussing new encry ...
April 30, 2015
The term "Fifth Column" came into popular use in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and thereafter as socialism and fascism were sweeping into conflict to take over the nations of the West. It means a group of guerrillas, activists, intellectuals, etc. who work ...
April 29, 2015
Publishers like nothing more than to attack censorship. They are right to do so; government attempts to suppress knowledge are always repugnant. Too often, however, the resistance turns into self-righteousness. The NYT leans in that direction when it reports th ...
April 29, 2015
Every day a new story comes out about something awful a police officer has done. And 99% of the time, nobody seems to care. The death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland is just the latest in a constant barrage of public atrocities committed by men in govern ...
April 29, 2015
A standing army – something that propelled the early colonists into revolution – strips the American people of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk h ...
April 28, 2015
Property rights are the cornerstone of a free society. They were already under attack long before John Deere started computerizing farm tractors. Usually the attackers are from some level of government, but large corporations are joining the fun. It's official: ...
April 28, 2015
You may not have noticed it when out buying things in the marketplace in the context of your personal budget, but according to the Wall Street Journal (April 24, 2015) the world is awash with too much stuff. We seemingly have too much of, well, almost everythin ...
April 27, 2015
We have to agree with Mr. Adler on one point. Replacing Administrator Leonhart with an animated Canadian Mountie would be a disservice to our country. If we must tolerate agencies like the DEA, they should at least have three dimensional, American management. I ...
April 27, 2015
A mother who uses medical marijuana to treat a chronic illness had her son taken from her recently after the child spoke up at his school about the health benefits of cannabis. On April 13, respected investigative journalist Ben Swann broke the heartbreaking st ...
April 27, 2015
One of the great ironies of American politics is that most politicians who talk about helping the middle class support policies that, by expanding the welfare-warfare state, are harmful to middle-class Americans. Eliminating the welfare-warfare state would bene ...
April 26, 2015
In a nutshell, people think the financial crisis is in our past. It is not. It is in our future. That was the overture to the opera, the beginning. This thing is far from over. It is the people who didn't understand that crisis that are the ones who think we ha ...
April 25, 2015
Violent overlordship, as we mentioned last week, is not eternal and in fact did not exist for long periods of time. In this week's segment we will describe its beginnings. It is important in our time to understand this. If rulership is eternal and inevitable, a ...
April 25, 2015
In 1970 country singer Lynn Anderson had a hit recording of a Joe South song that opened with the line: I beg your pardon. I never promised you a rose garden. I often think of that song in connection with the libertarian philosophy. You may be asking: for heave ...
April 24, 2015
Fractional reserve bankers love money. They don't love cash, in part because it reduces their ability to pyramid loan on top of loan and create new money from which they can extract interest. They have always had to tolerate its existence. Now, with the growing ...
April 23, 2015
Monsanto and the other genetically modified seed companies insist their products are safe. A substantial number of consumers have their doubts. The number is large enough to have enticed GMO-free food companies to step up their offerings. Alternatives are often ...
April 22, 2015
In our last commentary on police shootings (see Police Deserve No Sympathy Until the Blue Line Breaks), we said police officers are not different from ordinary citizens. This may not be true in Tulsa. At least one deputy sheriff there cannot hear gunshots fired ...
April 22, 2015
We have entered into a particularly dismal chapter in the American narrative, one that shifts us from a swashbuckling tale of adventure into a bone-chilling horror story. As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, "we the ...
April 21, 2015
Parents around the United States are rallying in support of the mother and father of the so-called "free-range" kids, the ten-year-old and six-year-old brother and sister, who were dragged into the national spotlight this year due to the harassment the family h ...
April 21, 2015
In spite of the great advances in reducing poverty and increasing the freedom and dignity of hundreds of millions of people around the world, the political and cultural climate virtually everywhere around the world is one of anti-business and anti-capitalism. Y ...
April 20, 2015
For once, at least, President Obama put his finger on the serious consequences of an ill-conceived government policy. Just look what he told David Simon. The war on drugs is creating "harder criminals" who are unemployable and often offend again. "What we're do ...
April 20, 2015
Last week two prominent Ukrainian opposition figures were gunned down in broad daylight. They join as many as ten others who have been killed or committed suicide under suspicious circumstances just this year. These individuals have one important thing in commo ...
