Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: More Voices, Please

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 11, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

If the social media and other high-tech companies, whether under pressure from the state or not, were to lead people to believe that, starting today, only accurate information will get through their gatekeepers, would the public, especially the most gullible, really be better off? How so? How would it do people any favors to have them think that everything they read or have access to through Google, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, etc. is good solid information rather than disinformation or misinformation? (Question: when the establishment media "reported" day after day over four years that...

Bastiat Foresees 1/6

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 8, 2022 | Blog, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics

"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose—that it may violate property instead of protecting it—then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850)

Socialized Medicine Ain’t Freedom

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 7, 2022 | Blog, Economics, Justice, Libertarianism

The emergence of a pro-Enlightenment, pro-reason, anti-woke left, with its eloquent declarations in favor of freedom, is welcome indeed. But this political force still has some way to go. It is disappointing to hear the same people who effectively and properly debunk the power elite in so many ways, including its Covid policies, nevertheless stop regularly to endorse Medicare for all, or single-payer health care, or better, socialized medicine. If you understand what's wrong with a system that enables a power elite to use the state to impose its will, how in the world can you also call for...

Government Education Chickens Return Again to the Roost

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 4, 2022 | Blog, Libertarianism, Politics

If you favor a government-controlled virtual monopoly in schooling, don't be surprised when a school board removes Maus, the award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth-grade class that covers the Holocaust from a language-arts perspective. If you are appalled by this news from McMinn County, Tennessee, maybe you should favor placing schools in a truly free and competitive marketplace, where entrepreneurs would have no institutional barriers to offering innovative forms of education. (For details see my Separating School and State.)

TGIF: Disagreement without Conflict

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 4, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

I'll admit it: I'm a natural-rights guy. I think you can get to individual rights, including the right to property, from within the ancient Greek eudaimonist (virtue ethics) and Spinozist tradition. But here's a separate point: rights-talk may not be the best way to bring unconvinced people over to the libertarian view of the good society. Heresy? I hope not. This video interview with Chandran Kukathas, author of The Libertarian Archipelago, got me thinking about this subject. Kukathas (whom I've written about here and here) starts with what ought to be obvious to everyone: people disagree...

Reason Has Limits, But What Doesn’t?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 2, 2022 | Blog

It is not a criticism of reason to acknowledge that no reasoning person or group can have a synoptic view of the world or of society that would enable him or it to rationally plan everything. The faculty of reason is packaged within individual human beings, and no mountaintop exists from which one could see and know all that it would take to plan a society or an economy in the interest of all its participants. The result of attempting to do so would inevitably be what Ludwig von Mises called "planned chaos." This is what F. A. Hayek, Mises's student, also worked so hard to explain. But when...

Boomerang Argument

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 28, 2022 | Blog, Libertarianism

Any argument against a totally free society that depends on the dark side of human nature inevitably circles around to hit the one making the argument smack in the back of the head. Hence, it is a boomerang argument. The reason is that if people are so bad that we can't trust them with total freedom, then how can we possibly trust anyone with monopoly political power? The answer is we can't. Statelessness is the ultimate in checks and balances, which liberal devotees of the limited state claim to value.

TGIF: Anti-Woke Isn’t Necessarily Pro-Liberty

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

I had a reminder this week that those who oppose fashionable postmodernist-style attacks on reason and objectivity, such as "critical" race and gender theories, are not necessarily consistent friends of liberty and the free society. That reminder came in a recent video commentary by Dave Rubin on a year-old speech by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas before the U.S. Conference of Mayors. What upset Rubin so much that he had to play the video clip several times was this statement from Mayorkas: "Unlawful presence in the United States will alone not be a basis for an...