Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

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...

TGIF: The Mythical Right to Medical Care

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 6, 2023 | Featured Articles, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

This clever video juxtaposes footage of Bernie Sanders and the late Milton Friedman to create a debate over whether the central government should take over medical care in America. Sanders condemns as a "national disgrace" the lack of a medical care guarantee for all -- rich, poor, and in between. Medical care, he insists, should be "a right of citizenship." Then, echoing someone in the audience, he changes that to "health care is absolutely a human right." The remarks by Friedman from the '60s and '70s chosen for the video address the efficiency problems with government-run medical...

TGIF: Year-End Downers

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 23, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

One always hopes to end the year on a high note, but politically speaking, at least, that is difficult again in 2022. One searches in vain for advances in individual liberty and setbacks for power. Sure, with the receding of the pandemic, life has returned to normal in many respects. But the ratchet effect that Robert Higgs identified still is the rule. After a rise in government power in response to a crisis (real or imagined), the drop-back is never complete because those who wield power have had their appetite whetted. The precedent itself presents a new threat. If the federal and state...

TGIF: The State Fuels Identity Politics

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 16, 2022 | Featured Articles, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Anyone with an ounce of good sense knows that destructive identity politics is run amuck in America and elsewhere. All incentives these days seem to go in one direction: toward identifying oneself as a member of an aggrieved group supposedly due compensation through government action -- of course at the expense of people who had nothing to do with the grievance. The actual perpetrators (if any), like the actual victims, tend to have long departed this world. Where real victims and perpetrators are still on the scene, grievances ought to be handled on an individual basis with due process,...