Randall Holcombe | The Libertarian Institute

Federal Confiscation Reflects Mission Creep and the Expanding Police State

by Randall Holcombe | Feb 26, 2020 | Featured Articles, Justice

In 2019, the Transportation Security Administration seized $181,000 in cash from an employee of a Tampa trucking company while he was going through a TSA checkpoint for a flight from Tampa to Cleveland. According to the employee and his employer, the worker was taking the cash to Cleveland to buy second-hand trucks for his company. The company says that cash transactions for these types of purchases are common in their industry. The company is now suing TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to recover its confiscated money. Meanwhile, TSA and Customs are claiming the cash was...

Another Problem with the War on Drugs

by Randall Holcombe | Oct 3, 2018 | Featured Articles, Politics

A local news story in my area, Tallahassee, Florida, reports that a sheriff’s deputy has been stopping motorists and planting drugs in their cars for at least two years, leading to hundreds of convictions. The story reports that 263 cases in which the deputy “found” drugs in cars are being reviewed and that 48 cases have already been dropped. While a new story here, the problem of police planting drugs on people, leading to their arrest for drug possession, has been reported in Baltimore, Los Angeles, and other places (see here and here for other examples). The war on drugs is misnamed....

Capitalism’s Biggest Enemies Are Capitalists

by Randall Holcombe | Jan 24, 2018 | Economics, Featured Articles

For most of human history, mankind’s standard of living remained perilously close to a bare subsistence level. Then, a few hundred years ago, capitalism brought with it the Industrial Revolution that has generated unprecedented economic progress. Capitalism is by far the most effective anti-poverty program in the world’s history. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, economic progress was so slow that people would not be able to recognize it in their lifetimes. The goods and services they consumed, the ways in which they were produced, and the overall level of consumption would have been...

Progressive Democracy Is Great for the 1%

by Randall Holcombe | Sep 6, 2017 | Featured Articles, Politics

The Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011 protested government policies that favored the 1%, the elite, over the 99%, the masses. Their protests were justified. The Wall Street fat cats who owned mortgage-backed securities were bailed out, but homeowners who had lost their jobs and couldn’t pay their mortgages were foreclosed. But that’s the way Progressive Democracy works. We can look at those two ideas of Progressivism and Democracy to see why. Democracy can be thought of in several ways. One is that it is a method of peacefully choosing and replacing those who hold government...

Introduction to Public Choice

by Randall Holcombe | Dec 2, 2016 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism

Public choice uses economic methods to analyze political decision-making. Too often, both “policy experts” and the general public perceive problems and conclude that the government should do something about them, without evaluating whether government intervention could actually make things better. Public choice examines how the political process actually works rather than relying on a hope that if things aren’t ideal, somehow government can improve them. I have just published a short book that gives an introduction to the theory of public choice. It presents the fundamental models that...