William Anderson | The Libertarian Institute

U.S. Actions Toward Cuba Are Criminal

by William Anderson | Feb 23, 2026 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

A recent Wall Street Journal article recently outlined yet the latest attempts by the U.S. government to bring down Cuba’s socialist government, a process that has been going on without much success for the past sixty-five years. Once upon a time, the U.S. policy toward Cuba was part of the greater Cold War and it was front-and-center in the national news cycle. (Many of us still remember the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if we were about to face an all-out nuclear war). When Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolutionaries took over Cuba’s government in early 1959, ousting the US-backed...

The Oklahoma City Bombing: A Lesson in Government Lawlessness

by William Anderson | Aug 27, 2025 | Featured Articles, OKC

On the morning of April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children at a day care center in the building, and injuring hundreds more. As the FBI website tells readers, a single ex-soldier named Timothy McVeigh acted alone, being motivated by anti-government sentiment that came in the aftermath of the Waco massacre two years earlier. The FBI version, of course, is the official version and the one repeated in history books and in The New York Times. McVeigh was aided by Terry Nichols, who helped him...

Sayonara, Paul Krugman

by William Anderson | Dec 9, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles

After spending twenty-five years as a columnist for The New York Times, Paul Krugman is finally retiring from that position—twenty-five years too late, if one wishes to be honest. It is hard to measure the influence he had from that perch, but his columns surely were the deciding factor in his winning the Nobel in economics in 2008 after eight years of lambasting the George W. Bush administration. (His Nobel Prize was given, ostensibly, for “his work in economic geography and in identifying international trade patterns,” but one should have no doubt that, without having the power and...

David French Is Still the Worst

by William Anderson | Jun 12, 2023 | Featured Articles

Most of us would like to forget many of the unpleasant aspects of our adolescence, and especially our days in middle and high school. No matter what the school setting, private or public, every place had its “cool kids” who ruled over the rest of us, especially in the school cafeteria. Journalism has its own version of the “cool kids,” those being reporters and writers from larger media outlets such as The New York Times (NYT) or from network news. In the past few years, I have watched journalist David French as he has maneuvered from National Review to his recent new perch as a...

The Truth Will Set You Free (Unless You Leak Government Secrets)

by William Anderson | Apr 20, 2023 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

Most readers might not remember Daniel Ellsberg, but for those of us who came of age during the Vietnam War, the maelstrom that formed around him and his actions helped to define that era. Ellsburg, of course, is famous because he leaked a number of internal government documents called the Pentagon Papers in which the writers expressed skepticism about the chances for U.S. success in the Vietnam War. Ellsburg chose to leak to The New York Times and The Washington Post, which at that time (as well as today) were the print voices of the political and academic elites. By 1971, when the papers...

Welcome to the World of ‘Novel Legal Theories’

by William Anderson | Apr 4, 2023 | Featured Articles, Politics

When Rudy Giuliani was pursuing his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, his aides admitted that they were indicting people on “novel legal theories” that had not been used before. A Giuliani lieutenant bragged to a group of law students that prosecutors in his office: were guilty of criminalizing technical offenses...Many of the prosecution theories we used were novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under...hadn’t been charged as crimes before...We’re looking to find the next areas of conduct that meets any sort of statutory definition of what criminal conduct is. At that...

A Naked Handout to the Managerial Class

by William Anderson | Aug 30, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Politics

When I interviewed for a teaching job at private college in Alabama more than twenty years ago, the recently elected governor had won partly on a platform in which the state would install a lottery system that would give students a $3,000 grant for college. As the provost and I discussed the prospects of this new program, he smiled and said, “We hope this lottery passes. Then we can raise tuition by $3,000.” (The Alabama legislature, despite being controlled at the time by members of the governor’s party, failed to pass and implement the lottery.) In the aftermath of President Joe Biden’s...

Joe Biden Is Killing America’s Energy Sector

by William Anderson | Apr 6, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles

One of the saddest quotes from the Vietnam War came from journalist Peter Arnett, who wrote in a dispatch in 1968 about an American attack on a Vietcong-held village: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” As often happens with such quotes, they take on a second and even third life. Today, the Biden administration seeks to destroy the American economy ostensibly to save America from the dreaded climate change. No one advocating the so-called Green New Deal (GND) has put it quite like that. In fact, its advocates claim that not only will the GND give us better weather, but it...

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