In a recent interview with Nathan Goodman of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Professor Michael Clemens, a GMU specialist in migration economics, put forth "a strange and striking fact about the world economy." A lower-skilled person's location in the...
Sheldon Richman
TGIF: Trump Fibbed about Favoring Free Speech
by Sheldon Richman | Sep 26, 2025 | Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Trump fibbed when he signed his first executive order in January, the one that promised never to repeat the Biden-era barriers to free speech. Everyone knows this by now. FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) summed it up well, yet only scratched...
TGIF: Social Peace through Government Retrenchment
by Sheldon Richman | Sep 19, 2025 | Economics, Featured, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
For at least 200 years, classical liberals (aka libertarians) have warned that the more power the government wields, the greater the lengths people will go to get their hands on it before their ideological opponents do. This is not rocket science, yet resistance to...
TGIF: Hurray for the Industrial Revolution!
by Sheldon Richman | Sep 12, 2025 | Economics, History, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Unbelievably, in 2025, walking among us are people, many of them young and college-educated, who believe the Industrial Revolution (spawned by the liberal Enlightenment) was a disaster for most of mankind. They yearn for what they imagine was the tranquil, plentiful,...
TGIF: Trump and the Separation of Powers
by Sheldon Richman | Sep 5, 2025 | Economics, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
The U.S. Court of Appeals' rejection last week of the Trump administration's global "emergency" tariff program was a welcome affirmation of the separation-of-powers doctrine. Next stop: the U.S. Supreme Court. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a 9-0 ruling that Trump...
TGIF: The Poverty of Poverty Data
by Sheldon Richman | Aug 22, 2025 | Economics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
"Poverty has no causes; prosperity has many. As history attests, poverty is humanity’s default condition.... But prosperity is not natural; it does not just happen." —Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux To hear some people tell it, America is in the grip of a vast...
TGIF: Immigration Control Threatens the Rule of Law
by Sheldon Richman | Aug 15, 2025 | Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Immigration control strikes at the heart of the rule of law. That fact is badly unappreciated, even by some libertarians. If for no other reason, people who cherish individual liberty ought to be appalled by what the Trump administration is up to. Trump did not invent...
TGIF: Socialist Confusion
by Sheldon Richman | Aug 8, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Recent polls indicate that many people under 30 view socialism and communism favorably. (For Marx, those words were synonyms.) It seems that socialism and communism are "in." What's going on? A self-described "democratic socialist," Zohran Mamdani, won the Democratic...