George Leef

For 12 Years and Tens of Thousands of Dollars, Is Schooling Worth It?

by George Leef | Apr 23, 2022 | Featured Articles

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

by George Leef | Jan 25, 2019 | Featured Articles, Politics

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

by George Leef | Apr 6, 2017 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice

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...

George C. Leef is the research director of the Martin Center for Academic Renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was previously the president of Patrick Henry Associates, East Lansing, Michigan, an adjunct professor of law and economics, Northwood University, and a scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Podcasts

Shop Our Books

Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War

by Gary Vogler

From the Foreword by Lawrence B. Wilkerson: “[T]he debate over whether oil was a principal reason for the 2003 invasion has waxed and waned, with one camp arguing that it absolutely was, while the other argues the precise opposite.” “Mr. Vogler, himself a former...

Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism

by Keith Knight

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

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

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...

« Older Entries