Has Israel gone mad? Or has it always been mad? What is the country thinking? The collective nouns seem reasonable in light of the widespread support in that country for the Israeli government's appalling military assault on the people of the Gaza Strip for the last...
Libertarianism
My Guest Appearance on the Bob Murphy Show
by Sheldon Richman | Mar 3, 2024 | Blog, Libertarianism
Podcaster and economist Bob Murphy and I recently talked about my life as a libertarian, the outlook for liberty, and Israel. Watch it here.
TGIF: Immigration in an Nth-Best World
by Sheldon Richman | Mar 1, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
We live in an nth-best society. It's neither fully libertarian (though libertarians disagree over exactly what that would mean) nor totalitarian like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, or North Korea. It's somewhere in between, closer to...
TGIF: Tariffs Tax Consumers
by Sheldon Richman | Feb 9, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
We seem to forget that a tariff is a tax. It is formally levied on importers, not on foreigners or things, but since it can usually be passed along, it ends up as an indirect tax on consumers. The point of tariffs is to protect certain domestic businesses and their...
Libertarianism Is a Rejection of Identity Politics
by Josh Tullis | Feb 6, 2024 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism
Politics often places people into oversimplified groups based on singular traits, attributes, or beliefs. People are rarely this one dimensional, so why is it so pervasive? It's useful for politicians to separate people into different groups to consolidate power. A...
TGIF: Autocracy — Boo! Democracy — Hiss!
by Sheldon Richman | Feb 2, 2024 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Here's why democracy is a dubious idea. Government decisions are high stakes. It decides matters of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, freedom or oppression. Yet we let incompetent people steer the ship of state. Most voters are ignorant and process what little...
Murray Rothbard’s ‘War Guilt in the Middle East,’ Spanish Translation
by Murray N. Rothbard | Jan 31, 2024 | Blog, Foreign Policy, Libertarianism
Editor's Note: This Murray Rothbard article was originally featured in the Spring-Autumn 1967 issue of Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, and is republished with permission of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Credit for the translation belongs to Mamela...
TGIF: Without the State, Who’d Drag Us into Other People’s Wars?
by Sheldon Richman | Jan 26, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
This article was posted shortly before the International Court of Justice ruled provisionally that Israel's Gaza military operation can plausibly be described as acts outlawed by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The ICJ...