Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

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...

The Best Speech I Never Gave

by Jim Bovard | Oct 4, 2021 | Featured Articles

Prices convey information, even the price of zero. There is often more latent intelligence signaled by prices than by the claimed good intentions of political zealots—even those on the side of peace and liberty. On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I tromped to the National Mall in Washington to make a speech on the evils of the War on Terror. Antiwar demonstrators had organized Camp Democracy, a few blocks in front of the U.S. Capitol on the Mall. The speaking gig was arranged by a lady from the Veterans for Peace who I met at the 2004 National Libertarian Party convention. After...

He Thought I Was an Undercover Fed

by Jim Bovard | Sep 27, 2021 | Featured Articles

From the early 1990s onward, I was exposing FBI crimes, lies, and cover-ups. FBI director Louis Freeh publicly denounced me after I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece on the FBI’s killing of an innocent mother holding her baby at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. I continued hammering FBI abuses in the Journal, Playboy, American Spectator, and other publications. One of the FBI’s biggest blunders occurred when it falsely accused a hapless security guard of masterminding an explosion at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Richard Jewell heroically saved lives by detecting and removing a pipe bomb before it...

9/11 Propaganda Poisoned America’s Mind (Including Libertarians)

by Jim Bovard | Sep 10, 2021 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Life in America changed twenty years ago after the 9/11 attacks. Many Americans became enraged at anyone who did not swear allegiance to President George W. Bush’s antiterrorism crusade. Anyone who denied “they hate us for our freedoms” automatically became an enemy of freedom. Plenty of stalwart defenders of liberty quickly found themselves banished from polite company. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, I had been bashing government policies for twenty years. Conservatives relished my battering of the Clinton administration in books such as Feeling Your Pain (St. Martin’s, 2000). But past...