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Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: Safety Can Be Hazardous to Our Health

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 27, 2021

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald, a rare leftist voice of sanity on so many issues, for opening his recent article this way: In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so...

TGIF: Thinking about Energy

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 20, 2021

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its sixth "assessment report" earlier this month. As usual it generated its share of alarmist headlines. The report is several thousand pages long, and I'm certainly not qualified to digest, much less...

TGIF: Evict the President

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 13, 2021

President Biden has reversed himself under pressure from his progressive flank and has given the go-ahead for a new moratorium on renter evictions throughout most of the United States for individuals making up to $99,000 a year (couples, $198,000). The twist is that...

TGIF: Why Wouldn’t Government Grow?

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 6, 2021

One of the least mysterious things in life is why the government grows. The better question is why it ever shrinks. People who devote lots of time to thinking about the importance of individual liberty know that government is inimical to human flourishing. So they...

TGIF: How Science Becomes Religion

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 30, 2021

The popular slogan today is "Believe in science." It's often used as a weapon against people who reject not science in principle but rather one or another prominent scientific proposition, whether it be about the COVID-19 vaccine, climate change, nutrition (low-fat...

TGIF: Critical Race Theory and the Schools

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 23, 2021

The government's K-12 schools--aka "public schools--are once again a battleground on which a bitter dispute is playing out. Wait!--once again? The government's schools have been a battleground since their inception in the 19th century. Since that's where the children...

TGIF: Who’s the Aggressor? Who’s the Victim?

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 16, 2021

When a libertarian says that the most basic individual right is the right not to be aggressed against, a clever interlocutor may accuse the libertarian of begging the question, of stuffing the rabbit into the hat. The trick, the critic will say, is in the word...

TGIF: Watch the Forest as Well as the Trees

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 9, 2021

It's always important not to miss the forest for the trees. U.S. government announcements, such as its report of the turnover to the Afghan government of the seventh and last military base in Afghanistan, Bagram, should lead no one to think that U.S. foreign policy...

TGIF: Defend the Enlightenment!

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 2, 2021

The libertarian philosophy is embedded in Enlightenment liberalism. This is clearly seen in its commitment to free inquiry (reason) and free speech, the full realization of which, I argue, requires complete respect for individual rights, including property rights....

TGIF: Liberty as a Problem-Solving Process

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 25, 2021

Strictly speaking, liberty isn't the solution to problems. It's what creates the framework in which solutions can be discovered. That is an important distinction because it reminds us that advocates of full-blown liberty do not offer the world a problem-free society...

TGIF: Is “Free Election” an Oxymoron?

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 18, 2021

American leaders and their loyal media pundits love to sit in judgment of other countries' election, declaring them fair or rigged according to their seemingly meticulous standards. In fact, the real standard is that the regimes "we" like hold free and fair (enough)...

TGIF: VP Harris Tells Guatemalans to Stay in Their Place

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 11, 2021

Shame on Vice President Kamala Harris. On her recent trip to Guatemala she said, "I want to be clear to folks in the region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come. I believe if you come to our...

TGIF: What the State Really Is

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 4, 2021

To better understand the nature of government, one can think of it as an agency that sells or, more precisely, rents power to others. The greater the power and the wider its scope, the more opportunities the state's agents will have to sell access to it in return for...

TGIF: About that “Real Estate Dispute” in Sheikh Jarrah

by Sheldon Richman | May 28, 2021

When the Israeli government describes the conflict over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem as just a "real-estate dispute," it has a point. Palestinian families are at risk of eviction (and some have already been evicted) from homes they've lived in for...

TGIF: Biden Labor Department Undermines Gig Economy

by Sheldon Richman | May 21, 2021

Why should government at any level have the power to overrule how workers and companies define their relationships? This question has become more important than previously with the rise of the gig economy, in which workers such as Uber and Lyft drivers are regarded by...

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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

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