Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: Why Do We Question Motives?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 3, 2021 | Featured Articles, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

I don't know if we're in the heyday of questioning the motives of people we disagree with rather than simply rebutting them--character assassination, that is--but it's got me wondering why this is such a popular pastime these days. Think about how often we hear people's motives impugned--even when they have impressive credentials--because of their positions on COVID-19, climate change, nutrition, racial policy--you name it. Considering motivation is not a bad thing per se, but too often it substitutes for a counterargument. That's a confession of vacuity. To oversimplify a bit, let's assume...

Really?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 1, 2021 | Blog, Economics, Libertarianism

Someday our descendants will laugh with embarrassment at the people today who pore over weather records prepared to proclaim an existential threat from a fraction-of-1-degree rise in the average global temperature over any previous year "on record," that is, unless the government spends trillions of dollars on a program of virtually totalitarian control of our lives. "On record" actually means "in the last century and a half" because that's how far back "the record" goes. And that, by the way, roughly coincides with the beginning of the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, which continues to...

TGIF: Safety Can Be Hazardous to Our Health

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 27, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald, a rare leftist voice of sanity on so many issues, for opening his recent article this way: In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to...

TGIF: Thinking about Energy

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 20, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its sixth "assessment report" earlier this month. As usual it generated its share of alarmist headlines. The report is several thousand pages long, and I'm certainly not qualified to digest, much less judge, it. I do think it's wise, however, to view the headlines and politicians' statements about it critically. The poppycock quotient of rhetoric about the supposedly looming environmental catastrophe is extremely high, not to mention toxic. At the risk of being accused of cherry-picking, I will point out that one expert on the...

Afghanistan Aftermath: No Firings? No Resignations?

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 17, 2021 | Blog, Foreign Policy

Joe Biden, who says the buck regarding Afghanistan stops with him in the White House, claims that the Taliban's final takeover of the capital, Kabul, provoking mass panic reminiscent of Saigon, 1975, happened more quickly "than anticipated." If that's true--spoiler alert: it ain't--then we taxpayers should demand the mass firings and resignations of anyone in the America intel apparatus having anything to do with Afghanistan. We should also demand our money back. Intel isn't cheap. The U.S. government has been in that country for nearly 20 years with a political, military, and intel...

TGIF: Evict the President

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 13, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

President Biden has reversed himself under pressure from his progressive flank and has given the go-ahead for a new moratorium on renter evictions throughout most of the United States for individuals making up to $99,000 a year (couples, $198,000). The twist is that Biden acknowledges that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which reports to his secretary of health and human services, has no legal authority for the action. Most courts have agreed about the lack of authority, syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum reports, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in June...

TGIF: Why Wouldn’t Government Grow?

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 6, 2021 | Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

One of the least mysterious things in life is why the government grows. The better question is why it ever shrinks. People who devote lots of time to thinking about the importance of individual liberty know that government is inimical to human flourishing. So they notice every sign of state growth. But most people rarely if ever focus on liberty or government per se because they understandably are busy with the usual cares and aspirations of life. Even if they occasionally sense that something ominous is afoot, they can do little about it. They might as well attend to things that are more...

TGIF: How Science Becomes Religion

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 30, 2021 | Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The popular slogan today is "Believe in science." It's often used as a weapon against people who reject not science in principle but rather one or another prominent scientific proposition, whether it be about the COVID-19 vaccine, climate change, nutrition (low-fat versus low-carb eating), to mention a few. My purpose here is not to defend or deny any particular scientific position but to question the model of science that the loudest self-declared believers in science seem to work from. Their model makes science seem almost identical to what they mean by, and attack as, religion. If that's...