William Anderson | The Libertarian Institute

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...

The Media Is Lying To You About Inflation

by William Anderson | Nov 23, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

With the recent rise in inflation—with subsequent increases in both consumer and producer price levels—one suspects that sooner or later people on the left either would downplay it or find a way to spin the bad news into something positive like an alchemist would want to spin straw into gold. Both accounts have arrived, thanks to the New York Times and the hard-left publication, The Intercept. The various accounts in the Times hardly are surprising, given the link the paper has to the nation’s political, economic, and academic elites, and given that these are the people that have created the...

Calling Out Paul Krugman’s Booms & Busts

by William Anderson | May 18, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

That Austrians and Keynesians do not share many views on economics (or probably anything else) is obvious, so a difference of opinion between the two hardly should surprise anyone. However, it still is important to point out the differences between the two camps, especially at the current time when Keynesians are all the rage in Washington (When did they ever leave?) and especially in the Joe Biden administration and, of course, the editorial pages of the New York Times. Perhaps there is no greater difference between Keynesians and Austrians than their beliefs on economic booms. In short,...

Our Tower of Economic Lies

by William Anderson | May 12, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

In a recent issue, Time Magazine boldly declared, “The Free Market Is Dead,” and then added: “What Will Replace It?” Of course, one always can expect Time to be disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst, and as an academic economist, I have come to realize that after reading Time off and on for more than five decades, this is a publication that rarely gets it right when it comes to economic analysis. Yet, we also are dealing with a publication that effectively reflects whatever the current spirit might be. In the mid-1980s, Time gave its readers the infamous cover condemning the...