Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: Spooner versus bin Laden

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 26, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

In his 2002 letter to America justifying the savage 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (himself killed in 2011) wrote after listing his grievances against the U.S. government: You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake: (a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems...

Class versus Identity Politics?

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 20, 2024 | Blog

Parts of the "left" and "right" often lament that class politics has given way to identity politics. I don't get that. Class was the original modern political identity, and state privilege was part of the cause. Libertarians and classical liberals long warned that lethal and impoverishing social disintegration would result from an ideology -- socialism-- based on Marxist class conflict, which pits business people against working people (as if business people don't work). We need to abolish politics, not reform it because it's toxic. That won't eliminate classes, or useful social categories....

TGIF: Thomas Szasz – Unappreciated Libertarian

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 19, 2024 | Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

I maintain that mental illness is a metaphorical disease: that bodily illness stands in the same relation to mental illness as a defective television set stands to a bad television program. There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. --Thomas Szasz (1920-2012) Monday, April 15, was the 104th birthday of Thomas Szasz, the late great debunker of the system of social control perpetrated, in cahoots with the state, by institutional psychiatry, the mental-health establishment. That system has included among its methods lobotomy, electroshock, involuntary "hospitalization"...

More on Immigration and Public Property

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 16, 2024 | Blog

Inspired by scholar Simon Guenzl, it occurred to me that regarding "state-claimed" so-called public property, people have been wronged not primarily as taxpayers but as potential homesteaders. (See Guenzl's "Public Property and the Libertarian Immigration Debate," Libertarian Papers, 2016 vol. 8, no. 1, and listen to his conversation with Bob Murphy's Human Action Podcast.) Guenzl properly distinguishes between state-claimed land and state-seized land, such as that acquired through eminent domain. In the latter case, government personnel took land from identifiable owners, but state-claimed...

Thomas Szasz: Champion of Freedom

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 15, 2024 | Blog

Today is the 104th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), the great if unappreciated libertarian and defender of individual autonomy and dignity. A psychiatrist by profession, for over 50 years, Szasz was the foremost critic of the social-control system we call institutional psychiatry, or what we could call the government-medical complex. He called it the Therapeutic State. He opposed involuntary mental hospitalization, forced medication, the insanity defense, prescription laws, drug prohibition, laws against suicide, and the psychiatric position (until the 1970s) that...

TGIF: Why Isn’t Antifa Marching for Apple?

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 12, 2024 | Criminal Justice, Economics, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

I was all ready to don a black mask for the Antifa demonstration when I realized that the self-styled antifascists hadn't planned a demonstration. What are they waiting for? After all, the national government has just started a new fascistic crusade. You'd expect the guardians against fascism to be out of the gate with great dispatch. But they aren't. You haven't heard about the latest fascistic crusade? It's the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Apple for "monopolizing" the smartphone market, or maybe it's the "luxury" smartphone market. The government is keeping its options open...

Israel, Zionism, Jews, and Anti-Semitism

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 7, 2024 | Blog

"In some quarters anger at Israel's brutal occupation has undoubtedly spilled over to an animus toward Jews generally. But however lamentable, it's hardly cause for wonder.... Should it really surprise us if the cruel occupation by a self-declared Jewish state engenders a generalized antipathy to Jews?... [I]f many Jews themselves repudiate any distinction between Israel and world Jewry, indeed, if they denounce such a distinction as itself anti-Semitic; if mainstream Jewish organizations lend uncritical support to every Israeli policy, however, criminal, indeed, abetting the most virulent...

TGIF: Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 5, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Opponents of people's freedom to cross national borders to where the best jobs are, aka open borders, make a rookie error: they engage in static analysis and overlook the dynamism of social processes that freedom produces. I was recently asked on Facebook: "Are you enjoying Biden open borders?" There's the mistake right there. People who ask that question look at a bad situation, say, the mess at the southern border; imagine one policy change, namely, the removal of restrictions on movement; and stop there. It's as if that policy shift would prompt no changes in how people, including...