Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

How I Said Phooey to College

by Jim Bovard | Nov 22, 2021 | Featured Articles

President Biden is tub-thumping for Congress to create new federal handouts to make college free for the vast majority of students. But as Ryan McMaken and other commentators on mises.org have pointed out, college is vastly overpriced and overrated nowadays. My view on college stems from my experience as a two-time dropout. I was frightfully bored in high school and had mediocre grades. Almost immediately after my compulsory schooling ended, my long-lost love of reading revived. A month before I began attending Virginia Tech, a kindly neighbor gave me the University of Chicago Great Books...

We the People Have a Right to Presidential Papers

by Jim Bovard | Nov 16, 2021 | Featured Articles

Former president Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit to block release of speech drafts, call logs, and handwritten notes regarding the January 6 Capitol Clash. Trump is seeking to prohibit the National Archives from delivering those records to a congressional committee investigating the events of January 6th. President Joe Biden has refused to invoke executive privilege to prevent the disclosure of Trump’s record. A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration documents must be delivered to congressional investigators, but on Thursday a federal appeals court temporarily blocked their...

Twenty Years of Tracking U.S. ‘Progress’ In Afghanistan

by Jim Bovard | Nov 8, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan ended with a bang in August as a terrorist attack killed a dozen Marines at the Kabul airport. For almost 20 years, The Future of Freedom Foundation has been one of the few organizations that stalwartly criticized the Afghanistan war. FFF President Jacob Hornberger helped set the gold standard for uncompromising honesty about the folly of U.S. intervention. It All Began With Bush I wrote numerous articles for FFF on the Afghan war. My first article, “Drug Laws: Terrorists Best Friends,” in February 2002, attacked the Bush administration for perpetuating...

Protectionism: Morally and Economically Dumb

by Jim Bovard | Nov 1, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

Protectionism is reviving in Washington on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats are cheering proposals to restrict trade to benefit labor unions and save the environment while some Republicans are reviving Smoot-Hawley style salvation schemes. Protectionist advocates routinely seize the moral high ground—at least as it is scored in Washington—by promising that restricting imports will magically produce fair trade. Thirty years ago, in my book The Fair Trade Fraud (St. Martin’s Press), I sought to drive a wooden stake into both the intellectual and moral pretenses of American...

Government, Cover-Up Extraordinaire

by Jim Bovard | Oct 26, 2021 | Featured Articles

“It’s not necessary to censor the news, it’s sufficient to delay the news until it no longer matters,” Napoleon Bonaparte reportedly said. The same standard helps explain why Washington politicians and federal agencies usually get away with covering up their lies and abuses. Many people assume that unless the government actively censors, people will learn what the government has done. But most government cover-ups succeed. Daniel Ellsberg, who risked life in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers, related in his 2002 memoirs: “It is a commonplace that ‘you can’t keep secrets in Washington’ or...

Down With Fraudulent ‘Fair’ Trade

by Jim Bovard | Oct 21, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

The Biden administration is embracing the same flawed “fair trade” mantra that previous administrations used to sanctify protectionist policies. Biden’s team has “largely dispensed with the idea of free trade as a goal in and of itself,” the New York Times reported. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai recently touted the Biden administration’s plans to “shape the rules for fair trade in the 21st century.” What could possibly go wrong from such a lofty aspiration? Thirty years ago, my book The Fair Trade Fraud was published by St. Martin’s Press. That book was translated into Japanese and...

When Barack Obama Got Away with Murder

by Jim Bovard | Oct 15, 2021 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

[Yesterday was] the 10th anniversary of the drone killing of Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, a 16 year old born in Colorado and killed in Yemen. He perished as part of Obama’s crackdown on terrorist suspects around the world. His father, who was also an American citizen, was killed two weeks earlier by another drone strike ordered by Obama. I wrote a piece condemning Obama’s assassination program for Christian Science Monitor in 2011, “Assassination Nation: Are There Any Limits on President Obama’s License to Kill?” I derided the Obama administration’s claim that the president possessed a “right to...

That Time I Swiped the U.S. Tariff Code

by Jim Bovard | Oct 8, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

"Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy,” as Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967. As a journalist, I have battled federal agencies for decades to try to discover the sordid details of how Americans’ rights and liberties are being shafted. Most government cover-ups succeed because the game is rigged in Washington to blindfold citizens to most federal abuses and boondoggles. But sometimes I found ways to penetrate bureaucratic iron curtains. A few decades ago, trade policy was one of the hottest issues in Washington. Pat Buchanan was revving up his presidential campaign and...