Ryan McMaken | The Libertarian Institute

Conscription: First Stop on the Road to Military Despotism

by Ryan McMaken | Nov 11, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The U.S. Senate continues to debate legislation potentially adding women to the military draft in the United States. This week, for instance, Senator Josh Hawley attempted to remove from the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act provisions requiring that “all Americans” (aged 18-25) register for the draft. We shouldn’t be surprised to find that Washington politicians are nearly all in agreement that at least half of America’s young adults ought to be coerced at de facto gunpoint into military service—presumably to fight for “freedom.” The only debate at hand apparently is whether or not...

The Federal Government Is Whipping Companies Into Enforcing Vaccine Mandates

by Ryan McMaken | Nov 4, 2021 | Featured Articles

Advocates for vaccine mandates—led by the Biden Administration—are apparently unconcerned that the mandates are likely to drive down total employment and reduce access to government services. In many cases these are the same services that mandate-pushing politicians have always insisted are utterly “critical” and must be expanded. Instead, the party is taking the position that the drive for vaccination must be placed before all other values in society, including public safety and employment for working class Americans. The whole affair helps illustrate, yet again, the problem of allowing the...

2% Inflation Is Killing Us

by Ryan McMaken | Oct 28, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

Fed chairman Jerome Powell is increasingly under fire for his apparently inability to take inflation seriously or admit it may be more than “transitory.” There’s been much talk of tapering the Fed’s enormous asset purchases, yet—as is typical for the Fed, actual action remains scheduled for some nonspecific time in the future. And if the economy weakens, as an increasing number of observers expect it to do, the Fed will surely chicken out on tapering and keep the money spigots open. Yet as recently as August the Fed and its officials routinely warned that there wasn’t enough inflation and...

Don’t Draft Women (Or Men Either)

by Ryan McMaken | Oct 7, 2021 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

As in many previous years, this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is chock-full of terrible legislation slyly inserted for the purposes of concealing matters from the public. Both parties have been long guilty of this, with both groups using the NDAA to pass police state legislation increasing federal spying and law enforcement powers. All of the NDAA should be considered controversial, since so much of it is devoted to perpetuating the US’s aggressive, wasteful, and counterproductive efforts at global hegemony. But the NDAA also often contains domestic innovations like this...

What We Have to Gain from a National Default

by Ryan McMaken | Oct 6, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

The Biden administration's rhetoric on the debt ceiling has become nothing short of apocalyptic. The Treasury Department has announced that a failure to increase the debt ceiling "would have catastrophic economic consequences" and would, as NBC news claims, constitute a "doomsday scenario" that would "spark a financial crisis and plunge the economy into recession." Apparently, the memo went out to the debt peddlers that they are not to hold back when sowing maximum fear over the thought that the U.S. might government might pause its incessant debt accumulation even for a few days. The...

The Fed Is Planning For More Inflation

by Ryan McMaken | Sep 24, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

In late August, Fed chairman Jerome Powell suggested that the Federal Reserve would begin tapering before the end of the year, an admission that price inflation was rising above the 2 percent target. Nonetheless, the Fed took no immediate action in the following month. This week, Powell again suggested a taper would begin soon, stating it would begin soon enough that the process could "conclud[e] around the middle of next year," and maybe could begin in November. This, of course, was highly conditional, with Powell noting this taper would only happen if "the economic recovery remains on...

Biden’s Vaccine Mandate, and State Power Over Your Life

by Ryan McMaken | Sep 13, 2021 | Featured Articles

The Biden administration on Thursday announced sweeping new mandates. The new mandates require that all employers with more than one hundred workers require workers to be vaccinated or to test for the virus weekly. The mandates also require covid vaccinations for the 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid. Moreover, vaccines are mandated for all employees of the federal government’s executive branch, and for all contractors who do business with the federal government. There is no option to test out in these cases. The new mandates extend an earlier...

Our Generals Are Complicit in Military Disaster

by Ryan McMaken | Aug 18, 2021 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In early July, Ron Paul penned a column titled “It’s Saigon In Afghanistan,” invoking the imagery of the fall of Saigon in 1975, when U.S. military helicopters scrambled to evacuate personnel from the roof of the U.S. embassy. But Paul suggested that maybe the situation in Afghanistan was “perhaps not as dramatic” as the situation in Saigon forty-six years ago. But that was six weeks ago. Now, it looks like the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan may be in many ways every bit as chaotic as the U.S. regime’s final defeat in Vietnam. When Paul was writing his article in early July, we were...