For Constitution Day, may I modestly suggest the perfect gift for your loved ones?
Happy Constitution Day!
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New Institute Book: Coming to Palestine
My new book, Coming to Palestine, will be available soon. It's the fruit of more than 30 years of writing about the Palestine-Israel conflict. Watch for it! In the meantime, listen here to my interview with Peter R. Quinones about it.
Judaism, Zionism, and the Dual-Loyalty Charge
Zionists, that is, Jewish nationalists, who hold that Jews qua Jews constitute something more than a religious community, open themselves up to the dual-loyalty charge. And that is exactly what the majority non-Zionist Jews warned against from the start. As Joseph Levine writes: It’s particularly ironic that Zionists should be making this charge [that dual-loyalty is an anti-Semitic trope]. When [Howard] Lovy (along with many others...) refers to the “ancient specter of Jewish disloyalty”, I take it he means in particular the standard anti-Semitic charge during the 18th and 19th centuries in...
The FDA’s Continuing Assault on the Principles of Justice
Eddie Gray, the owner of the online pipe-smokers’ boutique The Pipe Nook, reports in his latest YouTube video that the FDA has accused him of selling to a minor but refuses to provide the evidence. This is nothing less than a direct assault on a basic principle of Anglo-American justice: innocence until guilt is proved, which means that the government — exclusively — has the burden of proof and the accused has no burden whatever to provide evidence of his innocence. One obvious aspect of this principle is that the state has an obligation to present the evidence to the accused, who may then...
What Is Fascism? What Is State Socialism?
I was interviewed recently on how fascism differs from state socialism. The interview is based on my article, "Fascism," in The Concise Encylopedia of Economics. Listen here.
FCC Commissioner Wants to Ban E-cigarette Commercials
If a member of the Federal Communications Commission gets her way, commercials for e-cigarettes (vaping products) would be banned from radio and television. A ban would not only violate freedom, specifically the freedom speech that is supposedly protected by the First Amendment, it would also harm cigarette smokers by reducing information about a substantially safer alternative to cigarettes. (E-cigs may contain nicotine but not tobacco. Rather than burning leaves for inhalation, e-cigs a vaporize a flavored liquid.) What grounds does Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel cite? Public health, of...
TGIF: Who Owns You?
“The issue comes down to whether the individual is viewed as a private person or as public property: the former has no obligation to the community to be or stay healthy; the latter does.” “Virtually everything the Founding Fathers sought to achieve by separating church and state has been undone by the apostles of modern medicine, whose zeal for creating a therapeutic state has remained unopposed by politicians, priests, professionals, journalists, civil libertarians, and the public.” --Thomas Szasz Many people have legitimate complaints against the Food and Drug Administration. For example,...
TGIF: The FDA’s Assault on Tobacco Consumers, Part 3
Updated Feb. 11, 2019 Early one morning last December, Jeff Gracik was heading to his southern California home garage-workshop where he makes his living when he heard a loud, hurried knock on his front door. Thinking it might be a rushed UPS driver, he quickly opened the door. But it wasn’t UPS. Standing on his doorstep were three badge-flashing inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. They had come to inspect Jeff’s business. Just what is Jeff’s business? Does he produce food? No. Does he produce drugs? No again. So why the unannounced visit by FDA inspectors? Jeff makes...
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