Sheldon Richman

TGIF: Election Day 2022

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 4, 2022 | Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Another election day is upon us. We're told that we have a duty to vote because so many Americans gave their lives for that right. But perhaps it ought to be spelled R-I-T-E, as in a religious ritual. Is it a duty or a right? Let's make up our minds. In 21 countries voting is mandatory -- although the law is not always enforced -- but that absurd idea has never had traction here. There is something weird about an alleged right that one is compelled to exercise. It certainly would be unique. And did Americans really fight wars for the vote? Many who were killed in wars that the government...

TGIF: Free Markets and Greed

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 28, 2022 | Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." Ever since corporate raider Gordon Gekko, the lead character in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), made that declaration, left-wing opponents of the market economy have regarded that one-liner as the only rebuttal required to silence their libertarian adversaries. (Right-wingers like the national conservatives probably find Gekko's line useful too.) But Gekko's scriptwriters, Stone and Stanley Weiser, neglected to have their creature define the word. How interesting, then, that Gekko says, "for lack of a better word." Is there no better word or...

TGIF: Are Bosses like Rulers?

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 21, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

What does the libertarian philosophy have to say about business management as an institution? Is it analogous to the state or something entirely different? Since we libertarians generally dislike seeing people being bossed around, whether by the state or anyone else, we may be tempted, as I've certainly been, to think that a free and just society would spontaneously dispense with the traditional employer-employee relationship. After all, libertarians have good reasons to at least be suspicious of all hierarchies and subordination, right? So freedom would achieve its glorious pinnacle through...

TGIF: Governments Create Problems; Markets Fix Them

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 14, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

My article "Complete Liberalism" prompted an unexpected challenge. An interlocutor, who says he owns a business and thus is not antibusiness, claimed that my article suggested that, unlike government regulators, businesses never get things wrong. Yet business failures outnumber successes 10,000 to one, this person said, for all kinds of reasons, both innocent and malign, including a desire to pull the wool over consumers' eyes for as long as possible. The problem with the comment is that my article never claimed that business people always get it right or are always virtuous. I've pointed...

What Voters Need to Know About Government Supremacy

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 9, 2022 | Featured Articles

[Source for above image) Libertarians make a self-defeating mistake in assuming that their fundamental principles differ radically from most other people’s principles. Think how much easier it would be to bring others to the libertarian position if we realized that they already agree with us in substantial ways. What am I talking about? It’s quite simple. Libertarians believe that the initiation of force is wrong. So do the overwhelming majority of nonlibertarians. They, too, think it is wrong to commit offenses against person and property. I don’t believe they abstain merely because...

TGIF: How the State Violated Free Speech during the Pandemic

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 7, 2022 | Featured Articles, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Is anyone shocked by this observation? Public statements, emails, and recent publicly released documents establish that the President of the United States and other senior officials in the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by directing social-media companies to censor viewpoints that conflict with the government’s messaging on Covid-19.... This insidious censorship was the direct result of the federal government’s ongoing campaign to silence those who voice perspectives that deviate from those of the Biden Administration. Government officials’ public threats to punish social...

TGIF: The Scourge of Conscription

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 30, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

By now Randolph Bourne's observation that "war is the health of the state" ought to be such a cliche that it would hardly need to be said. And yet, it must be said -- often -- because many still haven't gotten the word. If the state is the adversary of liberty, as it nearly always has been, then it follows that war is also the ill health of liberty. And when one thinks of war, one ought also to think of conscription because it's often somewhere close by. In a perverse way, Americans have been lucky. The divisive decade-long Vietnam war and access to the latest war-making technology have made...

TGIF: Sam Harris on Saving Democracy from Voters

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 23, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Neuroscientist/philosopher Sam Harris caused quite a stir recently by defending the social networks' conspiracy (his word) to suppress news coverage of Joe Biden's son Hunter's smoking-gun laptop shortly before Election Day 2020. Harris said the suppression was justified because Donald Trump was such a threat to America that he had to be defeated whatever the cost to the election's integrity. In other words, according to Harris, such tampering is okay as long as he deems it necessary to save American democracy from the voters. The social networks are privately owned, of course, but remember...