Sheldon | The Libertarian Institute

Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: Thomas Szasz – Unappreciated Libertarian

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 19, 2024

I maintain that mental illness is a metaphorical disease: that bodily illness stands in the same relation to mental illness as a defective television set stands to a bad television program. There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. --Thomas...

TGIF: Why Isn’t Antifa Marching for Apple?

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 12, 2024

I was all ready to don a black mask for the Antifa demonstration when I realized that the self-styled antifascists hadn't planned a demonstration. What are they waiting for? After all, the national government has just started a new fascistic crusade. You'd expect the...

TGIF: Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 5, 2024

Opponents of people's freedom to cross national borders to where the best jobs are, aka open borders, make a rookie error: they engage in static analysis and overlook the dynamism of social processes that freedom produces. I was recently asked on Facebook: "Are you...

TGIF: Israel Humiliated

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 29, 2024

To more fully understand the ferocity of Israel's massacre of the people of the Gaza Strip, it's perhaps worth considering that on October 7, 2023, the reputedly invincible Israeli Defence Forces and intelligence services were made to look like fools caught sleeping...

TGIF: Leave TikTok Alone

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 22, 2024

This is America, last I checked. Surely, the government would not force the sale of a social-media company or ban its app from the Google and Apple stores. Would it? Well, yes, it would, could (perhaps), and might. A bill in Congress, backed by the government's...

TGIF: Reverse Scapegoating in the Immigration Debate

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 15, 2024

In the controversy over immigration we can spot a phenomenon I call "reverse scapegoating." According to Merriam-Webster, the scapegoat is "one that bears the blame for others." With reverse scapegoating, others bear the blame for one. Both are unjust. Reverse...

TGIF: Is Israel Mad?

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 8, 2024

Has Israel gone mad? Or has it always been mad? What is the country thinking? The collective nouns seem reasonable in light of the widespread support in that country for the Israeli government's appalling military assault on the people of the Gaza Strip for the last...

TGIF: Immigration in an Nth-Best World

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 1, 2024

We live in an nth-best society. It's neither fully libertarian (though libertarians disagree over exactly what that would mean) nor totalitarian like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, or North Korea. It's somewhere in between, closer to...

TGIF: What Should I Do on Election Day?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 23, 2024

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. --H. L. Mencken This column was prompted by a conversation I had with a few neighbors, whom I do not know, over the Nextdoor.com platform. I thank them for being...

TGIF: Trump Loves NATO

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 16, 2024

Trump is either contentedly ignorant of the things he talks about or callously scornful of his adoring fans, whom he sees as rubes eager to swallow whatever he says. He could be both. Above all, Trump is a Trump supremacist. Does he believe in NATO or not? (Believe in...

TGIF: Tariffs Tax Consumers

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 9, 2024

We seem to forget that a tariff is a tax. It is formally levied on importers, not on foreigners or things, but since it can usually be passed along, it ends up as an indirect tax on consumers. The point of tariffs is to protect certain domestic businesses and their...

TGIF: Autocracy — Boo! Democracy — Hiss!

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 2, 2024

Here's why democracy is a dubious idea. Government decisions are high stakes. It decides matters of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, freedom or oppression. Yet we let incompetent people steer the ship of state. Most voters are ignorant and process what little...

TGIF: Without the State, Who’d Drag Us into Other People’s Wars?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 26, 2024

This article was posted shortly before the International Court of Justice ruled provisionally that Israel's Gaza military operation can plausibly be described as acts outlawed by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The ICJ...

TGIF: Milei at Davos

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 19, 2024

Javier Milei, the newly elected president of Argentina, spoke the other day at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF is essentially a group of people who want world affairs centrally planned by political authorities. They are...

TGIF: Smells like Genocide

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 12, 2024

If it looks like genocide, sounds like genocide, and smells like genocide, chances are it's genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule provisionally on whether that is what Israel is committing against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The...

« Older Entries

Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

What Social Animal's Owe to Each Other

by Sheldon Richman

These essays, written over the past 20 years, have a single underlying theme: namely, that we human beings, as social animals, need individual freedom to fully flourish.

More Info

Coming to Palestine