"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose—that it may violate property instead of protecting it—then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political...
Politics
Government Education Chickens Return Again to the Roost
by Sheldon Richman | Feb 4, 2022 | Blog, Libertarianism, Politics
If you favor a government-controlled virtual monopoly in schooling, don't be surprised when a school board removes Maus, the award-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from an eighth-grade class that covers the Holocaust from a language-arts perspective. If you...
TGIF: Anti-Woke Isn’t Necessarily Pro-Liberty
by Sheldon Richman | Jan 28, 2022 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
I had a reminder this week that those who oppose fashionable postmodernist-style attacks on reason and objectivity, such as "critical" race and gender theories, are not necessarily consistent friends of liberty and the free society. That reminder came in a recent...
TGIF: Easy Cases May Make Bad Rules
by Sheldon Richman | Jan 21, 2022 | Featured Articles, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Hard cases make bad law, an adage apparently coined before 1837 tells us. In other words, "an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases." Not everyone has agreed that this is the case, but we'll let that go. I...
TGIF: Utopianism May Be Hazardous to Your Health
by Sheldon Richman | Jan 14, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Beware those who claim to have a detailed blueprint for the ideal society. If such a person thinks you stand in the way, you may get run over. That's how it is with utopians. They want everything just so, and woe betide those who disagree. The repeated attempts at...
A Porcupine Peace Plan: How An Independent New Hampshire Could Increase U.S. Security
by Dave Ridley | Jan 11, 2022 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Politics
"To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting."– Sun Tzu On March 12, 2006 five U.S. soldiers violated, then murdered, 14-year-old Abeer Hamza in her home at...
TGIF: Safety in Freedom
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 3, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
With the emergence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant, renewed restrictions on liberty or calls for their reinstatement have broken out around the world. The new wave is probably only beginning, and with it will surely come sermons on how we must face trade-offs between...
TGIF: Racial Polarization Is Poison
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 26, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Be they "left" or "right," those who agitate for racial polarization seem to have no sense of the harm they could do to everyone in our society. As the wise Glenn Loury would say, they are playing with fire. By polarization, of any kind, I mean more than merely a...