Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute

Lessons from Fentanyl

by Laurie Calhoun | Feb 16, 2022 | Featured Articles

The use of drugs is sometimes characterized as a victimless crime, since the person who ingests them will bear the negative consequences should something go awry. Supporters of prohibition, who wish for the government to regulate and limit sales and distribution, are typically concerned with not only the moral effects on individuals themselves but also what might be called the “collateral damage”: the family and community members affected by the user who succumbs and loses “the plot” of his life, so to speak. This concern with “collateral damage,” however, applies to drug (including alcohol)...

The Pharma Revolution Is Being Televised

by Laurie Calhoun | Feb 1, 2022 | Featured Articles

Marketing is essentially the art of persuading people to buy what they would not have bought, left to their own devices. This is achieved through manipulating either desires or perceptions of need. People who do not watch television are exposed to much less advertising of consumer products than are people who do. Similarly, the less time one spends surfing the internet, expressing either explicit or implicit interest in buying possible products, the fewer items there will likely be in one’s various shopping carts, not only because marketers now target people with ads catering to their...

Your federal tax dollars hard at work…

by Laurie Calhoun | Jan 20, 2022 | Blog, Foreign Policy

Courageously protecting the world from people who drive white Toyota Corollas and move stuff around town. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/military-releases-videos-august-drone-strike-killed-civilians/index.html

From GITMO to the ‘Killing Machine’

by Laurie Calhoun | Jan 18, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Twenty years ago, on January 11, 2002, the prison at Guantánamo Bay (GITMO) admitted its first round of post-9/11 terrorist suspects. Two recent films, The Mauritanian (2021) and The Forever Prisoner (2021), chart parts of the ugly history of the facility, during which acts of torture were rebranded by officials as “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT) and inflicted on at least 119 of the 780 men held at GITMO over the course of the Global War on Terror. The story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was cleared for release in 2010 but remained incarcerated for another seven years as the Obama...

Is Virtue Signaling Vicious?

by Laurie Calhoun | Dec 27, 2021 | Featured Articles

Virtue signaling—the practice of highlighting what one takes to be one’s own moral superiority, often by loudly denouncing the character and comportment, including the speech, of other people—has become a dominant mode of rhetoric throughout social media and network television. Virtue theory, in contrast, is a teleological approach to normative morality concerned with how actions affect one’s soul or character. Historians of philosophy usually trace virtue theory to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the first extant articulation of ideas such as that habits build character, and virtues...

The Gaslighting Government

by Laurie Calhoun | Dec 6, 2021 | Featured Articles

The film Gaslight (1944), directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, relays the story of a con artist, Sergis Bauer, who under the assumed name of Gregory Anton seduces and marries a young woman, Paula Alquist. The smitten bride has no idea that her charming husband murdered her aunt, Alice Alquist, who left behind a home in London where a cache of priceless jewels is stashed somewhere in the attic. The newlyweds move into the home, which Paula has inherited, and the husband proceeds to dig through the contents of the attic in an impassioned effort to locate the...

U.S. 5th Circuit Court sides with liberty, reaffirming stay against OSHA’s ETS

by Laurie Calhoun | Nov 13, 2021 | Blog, Justice

Hot off the press, here's some light legal reading from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court for everyone to enjoy this weekend. The clear concern with liberty expressed in this finding offers hope that sanity will eventually prevail against the Covid-19 hysterics and medical tyrants attempting to strip people of their bodily autonomy. https://dl.airtable.com/.attachments/db446ada300c17b1c8e3a6530561a46f/e7ff5065/BSTHoldingsvOSHAOrder.pdf

The Frances Haugen Insurgency

by Laurie Calhoun | Nov 8, 2021 | Featured Articles

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen has taken the world by storm by stealing and sharing reams of company communications in which the social media giant’s cavalier attitudes toward a range of behaviors among its users are revealed. She compares what she regards as “the Facebook problem” with earlier corporate revelations in history which led to legislation regulating tobacco and automobile use, and she emphasizes that children are specifically at risk from the company’s policies. The disgruntled former employee also alleges that Facebook products—in particular, Instagram—harm young women...