The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan (Princeton University Press, 2018, 395 pages). Almost every book on education policy (and I have read a great many of them) springs from the set of assumptions that education “experts” embrace: that schooling builds our stock of knowledge and skill, that it needs to be done mainly by government, that it makes us better human beings, and that we owe our prosperity to our great “investment” in education, kindergarten through college. Among the tiny number of books that challenge the conventional...
Civil Asset Forfeiture Suffers a Crushing Defeat
There are a few issues where Americans on both sides of our political divide are in agreement and one of them is the wrongfulness of civil asset-forfeiture laws. Under those laws (which exist at federal, state, and local levels), a person can be deprived of his property merely because a law-enforcement official suspects that it might have somehow been involved in a crime. For example, if a person is stopped while carrying a lot of cash and the police suspect that the cash might have come from illegal drug transactions, the police can seize the money. Or, if a police officer thinks that a car...
The Right to Try to Live
The Right to Try: How the Federal Government Prevents Americans from Getting the Lifesaving Treatments They Need by Darcy Olsen (HarperCollins, 2015); 311 pages. The highly acclaimed 2013 movie Dallas Buyers Club told the story of Ron Woodroof, who tried desperately to get drugs that might help arrest Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome back in the mid 1980s. While there were some drugs thought to help in treating the disease, none had been approved for use in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration. Woodroof and his fellow AIDS sufferers knew that no drug was guaranteed to...
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Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War
Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism
Imagine the Catholic Church (or any person or group of people) doing what the government does every day: Everyone who doesn’t give the Catholic Church 25% of his annual income every year will be put in jail. If he resists the Jesuit officer, the officer has the right...
Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania
FOREWORD BY JAY BHATTACHARYA, MD, PHD Diary of a Psychosis is different from all other books on Covid: it traces the development of the government response as it happened, bit by bit, and subjects it to relentless scrutiny: did any of it do any good? It thereby...