With the emergence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant, renewed restrictions on liberty or calls for their reinstatement have broken out around the world. The new wave is probably only beginning, and with it will surely come sermons on how we must face trade-offs between...
Sheldon Richman
TGIF: Racial Polarization Is Poison
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 26, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Be they "left" or "right," those who agitate for racial polarization seem to have no sense of the harm they could do to everyone in our society. As the wise Glenn Loury would say, they are playing with fire. By polarization, of any kind, I mean more than merely a...
TGIF: Rigged Political Language
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 19, 2021 | Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
It's an old trick: gain advantage over others by hiding one's meaning behind euphemisms and other forms of linguistic camouflage and misdirection. People do this in all walks of life, but politicians make careers of it. If they engage in straight talk at all, it is by...
TGIF: Equal Rights Now!
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 12, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
A pet peeve of mine is the distinction, drawn even by some market enthusiasts, between so-called personal liberty (or civil liberties) and economic liberty. The former, which usually includes freedom of conscience and religion, speech, and press, is thought to be...
TGIF: Another Climate Conference
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 5, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Sometimes we've got to be grateful for hypocrisy. If those who pretend to be world leaders actually delivered a fraction of what they promise in Glasgow, Scotland, where the UN's COP26 (Conference of Parties) Conference on Climate Change runs through Nov. 12, we'd be...
TGIF: The Challenging Art of Persuasion
by Sheldon Richman | Oct 29, 2021 | Featured Articles, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Anyone who hopes for a peaceful pro-liberty intellectual revolution is interested in the art of persuasion. But is it a practical art? Can enough people be persuaded to abandon long-held anti-liberty views for something quite different? I'm assuming here that one...
TGIF: That Bloody Government Debt
by Sheldon Richman | Oct 22, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
The government's attraction to borrowing is hardly a mystery. If the politicians had to extract every dollar they wanted to spend directly from the taxpayers, they might have a revolt on their hands--a bad career move for sure. Borrowing tends to make people more...
TGIF: Inflation Is Evil
by Sheldon Richman | Oct 15, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
When will Americans demand that the government denationalize money and free the market to do what it does better than anything else: serve the general welfare rather than the special interests? It's hard to know what it would take to bring this about, but inflation...