TGIF: Autocracy — Boo! Democracy — Hiss!

TGIF: Autocracy — Boo! Democracy — Hiss!

Here's why democracy is a dubious idea. Government decisions are high stakes. It decides matters of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, freedom or oppression. Yet we let incompetent people steer the ship of state. Most voters are ignorant and process what little information they have in biased and irrational ways. They fall prey to propaganda and demagogues. They are conformists and don't even try to vote their interests. Democracy is the political equivalent of drunk driving. --Jason Brennan, Democracy: A Guided Tour Well, we're into another out-of-control presidential election year. I'm...

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Looking for a Good Cause?

The problem for (not with) the younger generations is that all the good social causes have been taken and substantially addressed. (Of course, nothing can be perfect.) But hold on: one good cause is left: political-economic individualism. Looking for a good cause to enlist in? There you go.

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Palestine and Israel: What’s It All About?

Current events aside, the fundamental reason to favor the Palestinian cause over the Zionist project is not that the Israelis are Western and the Palestinians are not. That's knee-jerk woke "decolonial" claptrap, which does the Palestinians no favors. There's nothing inherently wrong with being Western, just as there's nothing inherently right with being Eastern, Southern, or whatever. Regions are neither virtuous nor vicious. From time immemorial, non-Westerners have been as brutal, domineering, and interested in slave-holding/trading as Westerners. Slavery was the uncontroversial norm for...

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TGIF: Without the State, Who’d Drag Us into Other People’s Wars?

TGIF: Without the State, Who’d Drag Us into Other People’s Wars?

This article was posted shortly before the International Court of Justice ruled provisionally that Israel's Gaza military operation can plausibly be described as acts outlawed by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The ICJ ordered Israel to take all actions possible to prevent the acts forbidden by the convention. But the court did not order a ceasefire. A full ruling will come later. The complaint against Israel had been filed by the Republic of South Africa. What’s more off-putting than seeing U.S. government officials and their spokesmen trying...

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TGIF: Milei at Davos

TGIF: Milei at Davos

Javier Milei, the newly elected president of Argentina, spoke the other day at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF is essentially a group of people who want world affairs centrally planned by political authorities. They are hardly advocates of laissez-faire free enterprise and individual liberty. Milei, on the other hand, is. He describes himself as a libertarian, an unabashed advocate of the free market, and even a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist. Milei's speech has to be unlike any speech given at a WEF meeting. It would shine bright even if today's...

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TGIF: Smells like Genocide

TGIF: Smells like Genocide

If it looks like genocide, sounds like genocide, and smells like genocide, chances are it's genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule provisionally on whether that is what Israel is committing against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The Republic of South Africa filed the complaint, which is ironic because Israel was a staunch ally of South Africa's former apartheid regime. The official complaint is welcome, but thanks to social media, each of us already has ample evidence from a large variety of sources showing Israel's assault on the Gazans. Just watch the...

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Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

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