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Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: Inflation Is Evil

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 15, 2021

When will Americans demand that the government denationalize money and free the market to do what it does better than anything else: serve the general welfare rather than the special interests? It's hard to know what it would take to bring this about, but inflation...

TGIF: Looking for the Green New Deal

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 8, 2021

I was all set this week to plunge into the details of the Green New Deal so I could see what new impositions the climate-alarmist politicians have in store for us. Then I made a startling discovery. (Startling for me, that is. I'm behind the news curve.) The Green New...

TGIF: Why “Science Denial”?

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 1, 2021

In a new book two professors of psychology, Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer, seek to explain why what they call "science denial" is rampant today and how dangerous it is. They also give their account in a strange conversation with Michael Shermer, the editor of...

TGIF: Beware the Government-“Science” Complex

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 24, 2021

The government-"science" complex ostensibly promotes the search for facts about our world, but it actually promotes and enforces orthodoxy, protects resulting paradigms, and manufactures apparent consensuses that are questioned only at one's reputational peril. That's...

TGIF: Get Rich Quicker!

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 17, 2021

"I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” --John Stuart Mill, 1828 We mustn't let the wrongdoing of politicians and bureaucrats blind us to the good...

TGIF: Bad Sign?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 10, 2021

When I see four of those yard signs on my morning walk, I chuckle. If I'm in a mischievous mood I might someday suggest a couple of memes that the owners might add. I could embrace all of those memes, but not without some qualification and in several cases, a good...

TGIF: Why Do We Question Motives?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 3, 2021

I don't know if we're in the heyday of questioning the motives of people we disagree with rather than simply rebutting them--character assassination, that is--but it's got me wondering why this is such a popular pastime these days. Think about how often we hear...

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...

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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