EDITORIAL
Showing 401 - 450 of 2166
July 08, 2015
A Subversive Fourth of July Resolution... or Is that Revolution? The quote is from "Firefly," a damned fine television show, albeit cancelled, cut down by Fox before it had the chance to take off, one that spawned a legion of fans of such devotion that an equal ...
July 08, 2015
Once upon a time, there was a nation of people who believed everything they were told by their government. When terrorists attacked the country, and government officials claimed to have been caught by surprise, the people believed them. And when the government ...
July 07, 2015
Many forms of personal liberty are under attack today, from economic regulations that hinder people from their peaceful pursuits of earning a living and improving the material conditions of life to an increasingly intrusive surveillance state that seems to foll ...
July 06, 2015
Last week we saw an encouraging sign that the 50 year cold war between the US and Cuba was finally coming to an end. President Obama announced on Wednesday that the US and Cuba would restore full diplomatic relations and that embassies could be re-opened in eac ...
July 06, 2015
With 90% of the votes counted, the Greek people have voted 61% to 39% against accepting the latest round of austerity that the EU is trying to impose on the Greek people for the benefit of the One Percent. What is amazing is that 39% voted for the One Percent a ...
July 04, 2015
Empires beyond their limits do their best to enforce "austerity" upon their populace, but never agree to curtail their very expensive grandeur. This afflicted Rome, much the same as it afflicts today's European powers. Today we'll see how one Roman emperor foun ...
July 04, 2015
Compared to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, his colleague Clarence Thomas is well regarded by at least some devotees of liberty. This is not totally unjustified. Thomas has demonstrated a familiarity with the philosophy and history of natural law and natu ...
July 03, 2015
According to history books, democracy originated in Greece. Of course, historians could be mistaken, but this is the prevailing view among Western populations with enough awareness to be interested to know. What we are witnessing today, July 2, 2015, is that af ...
July 02, 2015
You’d think with all the “stimulus” from Washington over the fifteen years since the dotcom bust, American capitalism would be booming. It’s not. On the measures which count when it comes to sustainable growth and real wealth creation, the trends are sl ...
July 01, 2015
After a psychotic man murdered nine people in a black South Carolina church last week, much of the nation has turned its attention to whether the Confederate flag should be removed from all public forums. Although this reaction itself speaks volumes about the c ...
July 01, 2015
How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use. In totalitarian regimes – a.k.a. police states – where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be ...
June 30, 2015
It is seventy years, now, since near the end of the Second World War Austrian economist, and much later Nobel Prize winner, Friedrich A. Hayek published his most famous article, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," in September 1945, demonstrating why it is impos ...
June 29, 2015
By ruling for the government in the case of King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court once again tied itself into rhetorical and logical knots to defend Obamacare. In King, the court disregarded Obamacare's clear language regarding eligibility for federal health care ...
June 27, 2015
It's an amazing fact, but humans nearly always assist their oppressors by obeying them. And not only that, but they defend their obedience and persist in it, even as their oppression gets worse. This week we'll examine one of the deep reasons why. Continued fro ...
June 26, 2015
The Greek drama continues to unfold with the risk of “grexit” becoming increasingly likely. Yet, a large majority of the Greek people want to keep the euro. This, however, would require the Greek government to live within its means — something it has not ...
June 26, 2015
I want to look at two words that the State and its hangers-on have employed with much success on behalf of increases in government power. One is racism. The other is equality. What exactly is racism? We almost never hear a definition. I doubt anyone really know ...
June 25, 2015
Dylann Roof's racially motivated murders of nine black churchgoers have brought predictable calls for new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. How ironic this is we shall soon see. Advocates of gun rights argue that the best way to prevent such atro ...
June 24, 2015
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) violates fundamental free-trade principles and should be rejected by those who advocate for honest free trade. Free Trade Principles: The essence of free trade is that trading partners should be able to trade lawful goods and ...
June 24, 2015
In one swoop, on June 22, 2015, a divided U.S. Supreme Court handed down three consecutive rulings affirming the right of raisin farmers, hotel owners and prison inmates. However, this push back against government abuse, government snooping and government theft ...
June 23, 2015
This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. On May 8th, Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied Powers in Europe. On September 2nd, Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, thus ...
June 23, 2015
The release of the encyclical Laudato Si by Pope Francis last week had the predictable result of winning the Pontiff plaudits and huzzahs in the world’s press, and another round of bewildered head-shaking among observant Catholics. Whether in his formal remar ...
June 22, 2015
Nebraska's legislature recently made headlines when it ended the state's death penalty. Many found it odd that a conservatives-dominated legislature would support ending capital punishment, since conservative politicians have traditionally supported the death p ...
June 20, 2015
Power is always grandiose and self-glorifying. But it is also self-destructive. It is the great error of productive people that they blindly obey power and contribute to its stupidity. Nonetheless, power always seems to hit its limits, where it rots in place an ...
June 20, 2015
The problem with responding to Alan Wolfe’s feeble attempt to critique libertarianism is that one might appear to be defending the particular people he targets: namely, Rand Paul and Ayn Rand. (Rand Paul was not named after Ayn Rand. At least Wolfe avoided th ...
June 19, 2015
If you want a recent, vivid example of the corrosive effect the Drug War has on the character of law enforcement, look to the actions of the officers who raided Sky High Holistic, a medical marijuana dispensary located in Santa Ana, California, on May 27th of t ...
June 18, 2015
Intellectuals have long been glorified as champions of truth and defenders of society's highest values. But in Washington, they serve as Leviathan's Praetorian Guard. Intellectuals are thriving in DC thanks in large part to the ruinous policy advice they proffe ...
June 17, 2015
Syriza, the new Greek government that intended to rescue Greece from austerity, has come a cropper. The government relied on the good will of its EU "partners," only to find that its "partners" had no good will. The Greek government did not understand that the ...
June 17, 2015
“Free worlders” is prison slang for those who are not incarcerated behind prison walls. Supposedly, those fortunate souls live in the “free world.” However, appearances can be deceiving. “As I got closer to retiring from the Federal Bureau of Prisons ...
June 16, 2015
American "progressives" portray themselves as "forward-looking," advocates of a higher and better freedom than the traditional American conception of liberty as freedom from government coercion and control. In fact, they are the intellectual great-grandchildren ...
June 15, 2015
If you look at the track record of the interventionists you might think they would pause before taking on more projects. Each of their past projects has ended in disaster yet still they press on. Last week the website Zero Hedge posted a report about hacked ema ...
June 13, 2015
As many of us have noted (loudly and often), centralization is the executioner of liberty and prosperity. That truth is seen very clearly in the history of Rome. Continued from last week… THE ECONOMIC FALL OF ROME This slave economy was a crucial factor in th ...
June 12, 2015
"But can the debate really be as one-sided as I portray it? Well, look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible!" Thus ...
June 11, 2015
Sir Patrick Stewart, of Jean Luc Picard/Professor X fame, has recently come under fire for defending the embattled North Irish bakery, Asher's Baking Company, that refused to bake a cake with a pro-gay rights theme: "Stewart called the Asher's case "a delicious ...
June 10, 2015
Reflecting on my life, I find a warm sense of kinship with Forrest Gump. For the handful of you unfamiliar with the fictional Mr. Gump, he’s a cranially challenged individual who by pure happenstance ends up living an extraordinary life brimming with interest ...
June 10, 2015
“Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s a shell game intended to keep us focused on and distracted b ...
June 09, 2015
The media has been full of stories recently about the new sensitivity on college and university campuses concerning the avoidance in courses or assignments of the use of "trigger words" or phrases that may have a "hurtful" effect on students when thoughtlessly ...
June 08, 2015
Soros is very close to the Ukrainian president, who was put in power after a US-backed coup deposed the elected leader of Ukraine last year. In the email correspondence, Soros tells the Ukrainian leadership that the US should provide Ukraine "with same level of ...
June 06, 2015
If you want to analyze a large economic system, the best way to start is by tracking its surplus. Who gathers the surplus? Where does it go? Who decides? And that applies to our modern systems just as well as it does historical systems. THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF P ...
June 05, 2015
Sen. Rand Paul accomplished something worthwhile when, almost single-handedly, he saw to it that Section 215 of the Patriot Act expired. For that he deserves our heartfelt thanks. But where does the expiration now leave us opponents of indiscriminate government ...
June 04, 2015
“A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy.”—Writers Against Mass Surveillance. THE GOOD NEWS: Americans have a right to freely express themselves on the Internet, including making threatening—e ...
June 03, 2015
If you're interested in knowing which scepters of power the Warfare State is most unwilling to relinquish, try wrenching a few from its grasp. The volume of the cacophony will let you know just how grievously the beast in DC has been wounded. And it's never roa ...
June 03, 2015
Students in the state's official propaganda institutions learn about the wonders of the democratic process, so called, throughout their years of formal study. But the truth is on full display during a presidential election season. These are not wise statesm ...
June 02, 2015
Keynesians never seem to learn. Every time an economy slows down or reverses gears and "goes negative," in terms of growth and employment, their only answer is a call for "aggregate demand" stimulus and more government spending manipulation. An example of this ...
June 01, 2015
This month Congress will consider whether to renew the charter of the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank). Ex-Im Bank is a New Deal-era federal program that uses taxpayer funds to subsidize the exports of American businesses. Foreign businesses, including state-own ...
June 01, 2015
The standard narrative floating about the mainstream press is that the developing world is held back by a quagmire of free market fundamentalism. Sure, there are a few exceptions to this narrative, such as Peter Bauer and William Easterly. But pretty much all w ...
May 30, 2015
Rome deviates from the cultural pattern we have been examining in that their creativity was not home grown and they did not simply overrun nearby creative peoples. Instead, they gathered to themselves the good ideas of distant peoples and made use of them, with ...
May 29, 2015
My distrust has deepened of Seymour Hersh’s retelling of the Obama regime’s extra-judicial murder of Osama bin Laden by operating illegally inside a sovereign country. That Hersh’s story, which is of very little inherent interest, received such a large a ...
May 28, 2015
Regarding the feverish effort either to reauthorize, "reform," or abolish the National Security Agency's collection of our phone and email data, two things need to be said: First, thank you, Edward Snowden. Second, isn't it great to see the ruling elite panicki ...
May 27, 2015
We now have a fourth branch of government. As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above a ...
May 27, 2015
Argentina will hold elections this year, and a number of provinces will be electing governors. Buenos Aires, the capital city, is holding elections for mayor, and Mauricio Macri, who is stepping down as mayor, is a favorite to become the next president. Toward ...
