Don’t Blame Private Police for Public Errors

Don’t Blame Private Police for Public Errors

There have been many calls of late to “defund the police.” None of them have been aimed at the private police. All of them have been targeted at the public sector, governmental police. Are these demands justified? Not very. Yes, there are more than a few bad apples in the long thin blue line. This goes, undoubtedly but to a much lesser extent, for private police forces as well. There always are some problems with large staffs with numerous employees. There are in the United States some 900,000 full time police officers, and almost 100,000 part timers, employed at all three national, state...

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How the Government Exacerbates Cancer

How the Government Exacerbates Cancer

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Witold Kwaśnicki, a Polish libertarian who recently passed away at the tender age of seventy. He died from pancreatic cancer. He expired not in a matter of years after diagnosis, nor even months. Rather, he succumbed in a matter of mere weeks. What a horrible disease that is. I am now 80 years old. I full well realize that no one gets out of this alive; that my life expectancy is not what it was ten, twenty or thirty years ago. How do I come to grips with the prospects of my not too distant demise? How do keep my chin up? I do so in two ways. First, I...

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A Solution to Transgender Sports

A Solution to Transgender Sports

Even in these politically divisive times, this headline fairly leaps off the page at you: “Texas Passes Bill Barring Sports for Transgender Students.” According to Texas State House Representative Valoree Swanson, a sponsor of this bill, it is “all about girls and protecting them” in the state’s University Interscholastic League. She continued: “We need a statewide level playing field…It’s very important that we, who got elected to be here, protect our girls.” This seems a bit unfair to a small group of marginalized students, but we all know the genesis of this initiative: boys with dresses...

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Eighteen ‘Offensive’ Words You Can’t Say in Canada

Eighteen ‘Offensive’ Words You Can’t Say in Canada

Think that the U.S. is the wokiest nation on the planet? Think again. Canada is coming up fast, and with its latest initiative, appears to be on the inside track. What has the Great White (pardon me for using this word) North done to warrant this characterization? They have come up with eighteen words that are offensive; you say them only at your peril, at least in the frozen country to the north of the U.S. What are these words? They are as follows: Ghetto; sell someone down the river; blackmail; brainstorm; savage; gypped; pow wow; tribe; spooky; black sheep; blind spot; blindsided; first...

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What’s Worse: Murder vs. Traffic Fatalities

What’s Worse: Murder vs. Traffic Fatalities

The murder rate in 2020 was at an all time high, and commentators are in a tizzy about this. It turns out that there were 21,570 homicides in the United States. This is an unprecedented increase of almost 30% compared to 2019. An additional 4901 people were murdered compared to a year ago. Why do I deprecate this by calling the reaction to these horrific numbers a “tizzy?” Do I not think that it is a serious concern that so many people were done in by their fellow man? Of course I do. Yet, not a word, not a single word, has been spent on the number of people who perished due to traffic...

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Walter E. Block

Dr. Walter Block is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at Loyola University and a senior fellow at the Mises Institute.



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Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty

Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty

Americans today have “freedom” to be fleeced, groped, injected, harassed, surveilled, vilified, disarmed, beaten, detained, and maybe shot by federal agents. From hapless homeowners hit by SWAT raids to pandemic lockdowns pointlessly paralyzing lives, government...

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