Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

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...

Afghanistan and the Sham of Democracy Promotion

by Jim Bovard | Aug 27, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Americans finally recognize the military lies that pervaded the success claims of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. But democracy promotion was an even bigger sham. Afghanistan was Exhibit A for the triumphal crusade to spread freedom and democracy. After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the U.S. government spent more than $600 million to support elections and democratic procedures in Afghanistan (part of the $143 billion the U.S. spent there for relief and reconstruction). Washington bragging points were always more important than Afghan preferences. "In 2002 and 2003, when Afghan tribal councils...

Nixon Closed the Gold Window and Stole My Political Innocence

by Jim Bovard | Aug 16, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

Fifty years ago, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. government would cease honoring its pledge to pay gold to redeem the dollars held by foreign central banks. Nixon declared he was taking “action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators.” But there was no way to defend the dollar against politicians. Nixon touted his default as therapy for his tormented fellow citizens, promising it would “help us snap out of the self-doubt, the self-disparagement that saps our energy and erodes our confidence in ourselves.” Nixon wrapped his decree with lofty...

America’s COVID Kulaks

by Jim Bovard | Aug 6, 2021 | Featured Articles, Politics

"Shut up and submit” is now the favorite COVID cure of some of America’s leading progressives. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist, revealed on Tuesday that since freedom is a mirage, people have no good reason not to comply with endless government commands. Unfortunately, punitive panaceas are increasingly popular among both politicians and pundits. Krugman breezily expunges years of Supreme Court rulings to remove any impediment to forcibly injecting a hundred million Americans with an experimental vaccine. Krugman explains that “when people on the right...

Biden’s New Budget Busting Bill

by Jim Bovard | Aug 3, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Politics

Since the 1800s, surly Americans have derided politicians for spending tax dollars “like drunken sailors.” Until recently, that was considered a grave character fault. But Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act shows that inebriated spending is now the path to national salvation. It was a common saying in America in the 1930s that “we cannot squander our way to prosperity.” But that was before the latest “best and brightest” crop took the helm of the federal government. The Rescue Act is based on blind faith in government spending—the revival of the “Magic Bean School of Political Economy.”...

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