Editor's note: Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton gave this speech to the Tbilisi Summer Forum on June 6, 2025. No offense, but Georgia’s interests are just none of my affair. It’s such a long way from here. I know my government has been messing around there...
During a recent interview with CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon provided a self-effacing but thoughtful critique of the mainstream media. Unlike Jon Stewart, who famously went on Crossfire in 2004 to call the kettle black, Dillon’s...
Back in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan famously championed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), referred to colloquially as “Star Wars.” Forty years later, in 2025, President Donald Trump has thrown his enthusiastic support behind what is tantamount to a...
Originally tribes of extended families and like-minded individuals joined together to create a community. They were self-governing and consenting associations of individuals, a unified whole. The head patriarch acted as a king, the head of the community, ensuring...
Donald Trump, who returned to the White House on a promise to end the Russo-Ukrainian War, has recently expressed his frustration at how the conflict has played out thus far. In a viral Truth Social post he published on May 25, 2025, Trump manifested his bewilderment...
India’s private education sector remains caught in a legal paradox. While the Constitution permits every citizen the right to practice any profession or carry on any trade or business under Article 19(1)(g), profit-making in education remains legally restricted. This...
A dubious theory held by some libertarians has been knocking about. It goes something like this: The claim that government-controlled land is actually unowned—and thus not properly subject to government rulemaking—would lead to consequences that reasonable people...
When Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Ted Galen Carpenter published America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course Over Taiwan in 2005, it was met with polite attention and quiet dismissal by most of the foreign policy establishment, which at that time was...
Whoever argues in favor of granting rights to animals, has first accepted that humans have rights and believes that animals must also be recognized as subjects of rights. And only someone who has a notion of what having rights means can meaningfully ask for this. Yet...
When Barack Obama bombed Libya in 2011, a number of conservative voices spoke out against the president starting an unconstitutional war. Those Republicans insisted that presidents must go through Congress to declare war, as Article I, Section 8 of the U.S....
An old family home in Washington DC has become the latest center in the battle over home equity theft—a practice where government can legally seize a property to cover an unpaid tax debt, sell it for far more than the amount of the debt, and then keep all the money...
It is not a new thing to try and shame or blackmail an individual into silence. Whether the evidence is real or doctored doesn’t matter; only the judgement of the public is needed to destroy a person's credibility. Governments and criminal organizations have deployed...
Given Marco Rubio’s long history of subservience to the State of Israel—which has earned him a mountain of campaign cash from the country’s U.S.-based collaborators—many Americans were understandably wary that his ascension from senator to secretary of State portended...
Biden administration policymakers hated you more than you knew. Four years ago, I warned at the Libertarian Institute: “Libertarians are in the federal crosshairs…Many libertarians assume they have nothing to fear because they are not engaged in seeking to violently...
Recently, the United Kingdom signed two “free trade deals” with India and the United States. Adam Smith and David Ricardo would justifiably take issue with the label of free trade because these deals have not established what the term refers to in the classical...
