Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: Fins Left, Right, and Center

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 17, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Th[e] central question is not clarified, it is obscured, by our common political categories of left, right, and center. --Carl Oglesby, Containment and Change You got fins to the left, fins to the right And you're the only bait in town. --Jimmy Buffett, "Fins" Champions of individual liberty and its prerequisites can't help but be disheartened by today's political landscape. For decades the Respectable Center has delivered perpetual war, domestic surveillance and secret police, a national vice squad on steroids, uncontrolled spending, soon-to-be-insolvent "entitlement" programs,...

TGIF: Games Politicians Play

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 10, 2023 | Featured Articles, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Except for the civic religion on ostentatious display at the annual presidential state of the union address, one can hardly think of a reason for the tradition at all. It's not as though we learn something substantive or even hear a truthful material claim. (Yes, it could be useful in launching a president's reelection campaign.) I'm sure someone somewhere has pointed out that democracy is not only a religion but also the opiate of the masses. When too few people could swallow the silly claim that the head of state represented the applicable deity, a new way was needed to assure the people's...

Black History Month?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 8, 2023 | Blog, History, Justice, Politics

If a Martian social scientist were to visit America, he surely would assume that Black History Month had been concocted by racists. And he'd be right -- for a racist qua racist need not bear ill will toward a particular group. What makes someone a racist is the very concept of human groupings, in this case, persons of African ancestry. In other words, what all racists have in common most fundamentally is the scientifically baseless idea that the species homo sapiens is divided into three (or more) segments that differ significantly at the genetic level. Like so many things we "know," this...

TGIF: The Tyre Nichols Atrocity

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 3, 2023 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols literally at the hands (and feet) of several Memphis police officers might be a source of cognitive dissonance for some people. But before we get to that, let's begin at the beginning. To start with the moral basics, the officers who initiated force against Nichols, a 29-year-old father, and the others who joined in once the assault was in progress, had no apparent reason to believe Nichols posed any danger to them or the public. Judging by the body-cam video, the first officers to stop and approach Nichols's car were exceedingly hostile from the start. It...

TGIF: Don’t Blame Wokeism on the Unfinished Liberal Revolution

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 27, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The National Conservatives are not only wrong about genuine liberalism -- that is, libertarianism -- they also apparently haven't bothered to read up on what they think they're attacking. Take Yoram Hazony, author of Conservatism: A Rediscovery, who recently appeared on the YouTube show Triggernometry. As Hazony makes clear, for him it's straw men all the way down. Throughout the interview he uses the word liberalism for the philosophy he blames for saddling the West with wokeism. That's unfortunate because people use that term in many ways. What definition does he have in mind? I think we...

TGIF: The Economic Way of Thinking Can Save Lives

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 20, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson (1903-1983) wisely said, "The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of readymade answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists." Excellent point, though I would both broaden and narrow her category of suspects. I would include most politicians, bureaucrats, pundits, and social-science and humanities professors in the suspect group. And I would exclude the economists -- spoiler alert: primarily those of the Austrian school, although others stand out -- who paint a much more realistic picture of the...

What Kind of Liberal?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 19, 2023 | Blog

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I am a Locke-Smith liberal.

TGIF: Where Socialists Go Wrong

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 13, 2023 | Featured Articles, History, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Since socialism is "in" today -- even though many people who say they favor it have no idea what it is -- F. A. Hayek's last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), is worth checking out. Hayek, the late great Nobel-laureate economist of the Austrian school, begins this way: This book argues that our civilisation depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism. To understand our civilisation, one must...