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Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: FDA Targets Black and Other Minority Smokers

by Sheldon Richman | May 14, 2021

Just when we are reminded that unnecessary conflict between the police and the people, especially in poorer black communities, is a poison to be eliminated forthwith, the Biden administration has moved in the wrong direction. Late last month the administration...

TGIF: A Refreshing Way to Think about Immigration

by Sheldon Richman | May 7, 2021

What I'm going to say about Chandran Kukathas's latest book, Immigration and Freedom, does not constitute a book review. Think of it instead as a book alert. Even having read only the preface and a couple of chapters, I am confident it is a book that fans of liberty...

TGIF: Bust the Conservative “Trust Busters”

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 30, 2021

When right-wing leader Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) recently declared that "liberty and monopoly do not go together," I fantasized that he had become a free-market anarchist. When I hear monopoly, I think government because what's the most literal of monopolies (or source...

TGIF: Does Nearly Everyone Favor Industrial Policy?

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 23, 2021

Over the years I've heard countless arguments about which word best describes the American economic system. Some insist it is essentially socialist, while others favor the word fascism. (Fascism is socialism with a private-property and market veneer.) Still others...

TGIF: Are Organizations Unlibertarian?

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 16, 2021

A few weeks ago YouTube suggested that I watch a 1988 episode of William F. Buckley's PBS TV show, "Firing Line," featuring Ron Paul, who at the time was the Libertarian Party candidate for president. I had to chuckle right at the top when Buckley introduced Rep. Paul...

TGIF: The Fraught World of Second-Bests

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 9, 2021

When discussion turns to how to make government "better," however any particular person would conceive that condition, libertarians understand that we are in the fraught world of second-bests. In other words, because of the nature of the state, no solution that merely...

TGIF: Targeted Advertising Violates No Liberty

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 2, 2021

Last week I modestly attempted to show that no injustice takes place when A sells B the opportunity to pitch its product to C. This is the principle behind print, television, and radio advertising, and it is no different in the era of social networks like Facebook. In...

TGIF: The Bias against Advertising

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 26, 2021

People who dislike markets harbor a special animosity toward advertising as cynically controlling. This is not new. In the mid-20th century John Kenneth Galbraith and other market opponents condemned advertising as business's way to manipulate people into buying...

TGIF: What’s Wrong with the Welfare State

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 19, 2021

Let's start with what is not wrong with the welfare state. Much criticism of the welfare state focuses on how it encourages dependence not only on the government, but dependence on others per se. In some circles the wish for a social safety net is disparaged as a...

TGIF: U(nspeakably) S(adistic) Foreign Policy

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 12, 2021

If you had set out to construct a foreign policy designed to impose indescribable suffering on millions of innocent people around the world, you'd have a tough time coming up with anything more systematic and effective than U.S. foreign policy. An inventory of U.S....

TGIF: That Old Minimum-Wage Magic

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 5, 2021

You don't have to actually think that legislating and raising the minimum wage will help low-skilled workers earn more money. That's not the point. The point is to display your correct political religion. Today favoring stepping the minimum wage up to $15 an hour is...

Individual, Not National, Self-Determination Should Be the Goal

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 5, 2021

Jeff Halper, the American-born, Israel-based veteran human-rights activist is heroic. He has dedicated his life to working for justice for the Palestinian victims of Israeli settler colonialism, much of that as the director of the Israeli Committee Against House...

TGIF: What Now, Libertarians?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 12, 2021

The prospects for individual liberty and the required rollback of the government seem as bleak as ever, but we can't let appearances, no matter how pervasive, be decisive. The spark within most people--the longing to chart one's course in life--never really dies....

TGIF: Imperial America, Which Never Left, Is Back

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 5, 2021

In a cliche-ridden foreign-policy speech delivered at the State Department on Thursday, President Joe Biden declared that "America is back"--on the global stage, presumably, as policeman of the world, but certainly not a disinterested policeman. The problem is that it...

TGIF: Is Socialism Good in Theory?

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 9, 2020

This is an expanded version of something I wrote for The Freeman, October 2003, during my tenure as the editor. Socialism has been mortally discredited on economic grounds, thanks to Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and history. But for many people it has not been...

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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