Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

How I Robbed the World Bank

by Jim Bovard | Dec 14, 2021 | Featured Articles

I have always had a bad attitude toward official secrets regardless of who is keeping them. That prejudice and John Kenneth Galbraith are to blame for an unauthorized withdrawal I made from the World Bank. When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I paid $25 to attend a series of lectures by Galbraith on foreign aid and other topics. The louder Galbraith praised foreign aid, the warier I became. His hokum spurred my reading and led me to recognize that foreign aid is one of the worst afflictions that poor nations suffer. As one critic quipped, foreign aid is money from governments, to...

Biden’s Keynesian Course: Riding the ‘Multiplier’

by Jim Bovard | Dec 9, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain tweeted on Wednesday: “Stronger COVID measures produce STRONGER ECONOMIC outcomes. That’s why jobs, growth, and economic activity are UP this year, significantly over last year.” Actually, jobs and economic activity have rebounded because governors are no longer locking down businesses, schools, and daily life. But Biden’s team is painting its latest COVID decrees as the key to renewed prosperity. Biden’s team is tacitly invoking a long history of multipliers to justify government interventions. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes popularized the notion...

‘State Secrets’ Hide Government Perfidy

by Jim Bovard | Nov 29, 2021 | Featured Articles

Will federal law enforcement agencies ever be forced to disclose their abuses of American citizens? The Supreme Court could answer that question in its decision on a potentially landmark case it heard last week regarding surveillance of Muslim communities in California. Though the case may be decided on narrow grounds, it involves a legal Pandora’s Box that has spawned and shielded the worst abuses of the post-9/11 era. Beginning in 2006, the FBI sent Craig Monteilh, a former Drug Enforcement Administration informant, into mosques in southern California to gather evidence against Muslims at...

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...

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