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Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: Free the Housing Market!

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 21, 2025

Economist Bryan Caplan has done it again. His latest graphic nonfiction book is Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, illustrated by Ady Branzei and published by the Cato Institute. (His first was Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of...

TGIF: Emergency! Emergency?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 14, 2025

Look, as a libertarian I think the list of federal entities to be abolished soon should include the: Consumer Financial Protection Board, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve System,...

TGIF: Free Speech Restored?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 7, 2025

Don't get accustomed to me praising Donald Trump, but exceptions will occur now and then. Trump is no principled friend of liberty, not by a long shot. Judging by most of his actions and words, he recognizes no impenetrable boundary between the government and the...

TGIF: Birthright Citizenship and the Constitution

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 31, 2025

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.... —U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIV Donald Trump says he wants a "revolution of common sense." If he means it, he will abandon his...

TGIF: Why McKinley?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 24, 2025

Now what will hasten the day when our present advantages will wear out and when we shall come down to the conditions of the older and densely populated nations? The answer is: war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and...

TGIF: The H-1B Controversy

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 17, 2025

Does anyone still believe that the market process should set prices, including wages? Apparently not. Take the controversy surrounding the H-1B visa, the program that "permits" employers to hire highly educated and skilled foreign workers, such as hi-tech personnel....

TGIF: Efficient Bureaucracy?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 10, 2025

With all the talk about government efficiency, it would be useful to remind ourselves why bureaucracies differ radically from for-profit businesses. Ludwig von Mises devoted a short but enlightening volume to this subject in 1944, Bureaucracy. Elon Musk and Vivek...

TGIF: Capitalist Exploitation or Interest?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 3, 2025

The completely just proposition that the worker is to receive the entire value of his product can be reasonably interpreted to mean either that he is to receive the full present value of his product now or that he is to get the entire future value in the future. But...

TGIF: Social Cooperation Versus Violence

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 27, 2024

The chilling photo of a hooded man cold-bloodedly executing a health-insurance CEO on a busy New York City street should make any decent person pause and reflect. Anyone who even glimpses the role of social cooperation in making life better and longer felt sickened,...

TGIF: The Unfortunately Forgotten Sumner

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 20, 2024

Some things haven't changed since 1883. In that year Yale University professor William Graham Sumner, the anti-imperialist laissez-faire liberal and pioneer of American sociology, noticed that "we are told every day that great social problems stand before us and...

TGIF: “Corporate” Is Not a Four-Letter Word

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 13, 2024

I rise today to protest the widespread and malicious use of the adjective corporate as a synonym for evil, corrupt, exploitative, or any number of other pejoratives. As a descriptor, corporate merely says that an association that makes or sells goods for profit is...

TGIF: Supply Precedes Demand

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 6, 2024

"Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production." —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 "In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Their buying and their abstention from buying ultimately determine what the entrepreneurs produce and in what...

TGIF: On Fairness

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 29, 2024

Fairness and its synonyms are among the most abused words in English. By that I mean they are commonly manipulated for ideological ends. Wokeness has aggravated a situation that has existed for some time. What better way to score points for a political position than...

TGIF: “You Didn’t Build That”

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 22, 2024

Remember Barack Obama's profound 2012 campaign speech about success? Here's part of what he said: There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful,...

TGIF: Police-State Progressives

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 15, 2024

Progressives see themselves as, well, progressive. But they aren't. Even at their best, in opposing the national security state, they support massive government power in other realms of life. At heart they are social engineers. They seek a "moral equivalent of war,"...

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Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

What Social Animal's Owe to Each Other

by Sheldon Richman

Book Animalssm

These essays, written over the past 20 years, have a single underlying theme: namely, that we human beings, as social animals, need individual freedom to fully flourish.

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Coming to Palestine