Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute

The Greatest Tariff Speech in Congressional History

by Jim Bovard | Nov 19, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, History

Donald Trump is bringing his idolatry of high tariffs back to the White House. Trump proclaims that “tariffs are the greatest!” and that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Vast numbers of his Republican supporters will echo any dubious dogma that Trump sanctifies. In the coming months, Washington will be deluged with convoluted economic analyses vindicating or damning high tariffs. To vanquish the new protectionism, the friends of free trade should recall the lofty rhetoric from an era when the tariff was debated with far more clarity and passion. High tariffs became...

The ‘Will of the People’ Post-Election Horror Show

by Jim Bovard | Nov 4, 2024 | Featured Articles, Politics

On the morning after elections, many voters wake up and instinctively quote Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this?” “Will of the people!” is the correct answer—at least if a Democrat won the election. Actually, the notion that election results represent the “will of the people” is one of the most audacious triumphs of democratic propaganda. Ever since the Civil War era, presidents have periodically invoked “will of the people” to sanctify their own power. President Andrew Johnson declared in 1867 that “the appointing power”—i.e., himself—“represents the collective majesty and speaks the...

The “Freedom From Fear” Ticket for Tyranny

by Jim Bovard | Oct 23, 2024 | Featured Articles

The Democratic Party is championing presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a born-again champion of freedom. Earlier this year, Democrats shifted their focus from democracy to freedom, convinced that the latter word would enthrall voters on Election Day. Providing “freedom from fear” has become one of their most frequent political promises this past century. Politicians routinely portray freedom from fear as the apex of freedom, higher than the initial freedoms buttressed by the Bill of Rights. While presidents have defined “freedom from fear” differently, the common thread is that it...

What I’ve Learned Covering Ten Depraved Presidential Elections

by Jim Bovard | Oct 9, 2024 | Featured Articles, Politics

Presidential season is a time for Americans to restore their faith in democracy. How can folks not be filled with gratitude for being permitted a perfunctory choice of who will seize their paychecks and tyrannize them in the following four years? Actually, I’ve had a bad attitude on presidential elections going back to the end of the Reagan era. In a 1988 Detroit News piece headlined “Quadrennial Hunt for the Great Man,” I wrote, “Every four years or so, the absurdity of our current system becomes vivid. We have created a huge engine of government—even though there is no one even vaguely...

American Atrocity: Remembering the Shenandoah Burning

by Jim Bovard | Sep 30, 2024 | Featured Articles, History

George Orwell wrote in 1945 that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” This week is the 160th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the American Civil War, a barbarous episode that vanished long ago from history books. Union General Philip Sheridan laid waste to a hundred mile swath of the Shenandoah Valley, leaving vast numbers of women and children on the edge of starvation. Before the summer of 1864, the Civil War was primarily fought on battlefields. After failing...

Hillary Clinton’s Sordid History of Secrecy and Censorship

by Jim Bovard | Sep 23, 2024 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Politics

“You could drop Hillary into any trouble spot, come back in a month and…she will have made it better,” former President Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy. But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere. As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc to rescue truth—or at least to call for hammering government critics. But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for fifteen years. Last Monday evening,...

Did the IRS Manipulate the 2020 Election?

by Jim Bovard | Sep 9, 2024 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Politics

Hunter Biden pled guilty on Thursday to a barrage of federal tax crimes. But will the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department ever plead guilty to stealing the 2020 election for Joe Biden? In 2023, the IRS assessed 18,599,109 penalties on individuals who allegedly underpaid or failed to pay federal income taxes. How did the IRS miss Hunter Biden for so long? In 2021, the Biden administration sought to compel banks to report to the IRS any bank account with more than $600 in transactions per year. But the feds effectively disregarded multimillion dollar windfalls pouring into Hunter’s...

Democracy’s Damndest Defamation

by Jim Bovard | Sep 4, 2024 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Politics

In a democracy, people automatically become liable for whatever the government inflicts upon them. Many of the most deadly errors of contemporary political thinking stem from the notion that in a democracy the government is the people and vice versa, so there is scant reason to distinguish between the two—or to worry about protecting citizens from the government. In 1798, President John Adams pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts, which empowered Adams to suppress free speech and imprison without trial any critic of the federal government. When the citizens of Westmoreland...