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Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: What Government Has Wrought

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 6, 2024

Imagine two candidates for president, and ask yourself who is more likely to win. Candidate A observes that people are facing generally rising prices. Their total at the supermarket checkout is higher than last year. Filling up the car at the gas station takes a...

TGIF: Doing Good at a Profit

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 30, 2024

[P]eople started to believe that the bourgeoisie and its economic activities of trade and innovation were virtuous, or at least tolerable. In every successful lurch into modern riches from Holland in 1650 to the United States in 1900 to China in 2000, one sees a...

TGIF: Back to Barbarism

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 23, 2024

Has Kamala Harris inadvertently done free-market advocates a favor? Let's not get too hopeful, but maybe. How so? By pandering to voters and marketing herself as a consumer watchdog who will stamp out (undefined) supermarket "price gouging." This could create teaching...

TGIF: Gaslighting

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 16, 2024

I wonder who's gaslighting us now. Here are some of the major perpetrators: The pundits and pseudo-economists of all tribes who try to convince us that the government can spend, borrow, and create money almost without limit or harm. What happens when interest on the...

TGIF: Khan Controlling Trade

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 9, 2024

Lina Khan is a Washington, D.C., rock star. She is not only President Joe Biden's celebrated chief of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); she's also a favorite of J. D. Vance, Donald Trump's pick for vice president. This Lina Khan must really have something going for...

TGIF: Democracy as Religion

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 2, 2024

During a conversation with someone who loves representative democracy but hates America's current political situation, I pointed out a problem with his view. The current situation, I said, is a product of representative democracy. So you can't have the system without...

TGIF: Damn Consumers!

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 26, 2024

Global free trade is about individual, not national, freedom—for consumers and producers who import raw materials, tools, and semi-finished products. Aside from its role as an aspect of personal liberty, free trade's efficiency benefits have been well-established...

TGIF: The Populist Trap

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 19, 2024

If you care about individual freedom and general prosperity, you'll want to avoid all shades of populism like the plague. It is economic illiteracy proudly proclaimed and writ large. As an alternative to libertarianism, it is bad in its own right—freedom is not on its...

TGIF: Culture without Romance

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 12, 2024

"The entire history of the human race, the rise of man from the caves, has been marked by transfers of cultural advances from one group to another and from one civilization to another." So said economist, social philosopher, and historian Thomas Sowell in a 1990...

TGIF: On the Pursuit of Happiness

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 5, 2024

The most remarkable phrase in the Declaration of Independence, whose anniversary we just celebrated, is the pursuit of happiness. Looking back 248 years, that phrase may strike the modern ear as strange for a political document. But it apparently did not seem that way...

TGIF: No Cheers for Decolonization(R)

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 28, 2024

How can a libertarian oppose decolonization? Colonization not only oppressed conquered peoples, as the staunchest early classical liberals never tired of pointing out, but also burdened the taxpayers of the home country, who were forced to pay through the nose for...

TGIF: What Free Market in Health Care?

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 21, 2024

Contrary to a popular article of faith, America has no free market in health care—far from it. Consider this: the largest lobby in Washington, D.C., is—wait for it—the health care and health insurance industries. Last year, they spent 5.8 times the amount the...

TGIF: “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 14, 2024

The famous line "We have met the enemy and he is us" is from Walt Kelly's comic strip, Pogo. Kelly adapted the line from a U.S. naval commandant who, during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, reported to his superior, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”...

TGIF: Freedom or Power

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 7, 2024

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, the Austrian-school economist who learned from Carl Menger and taught Ludwig von Mises, speaks to the ages. We ignore his lessons to our peril. One hundred ten years ago, in a journal article titled "Control or Economic Law," he wrote: [J]ust as...

TGIF: Government Undermines Civilization

by Sheldon Richman | May 31, 2024

The good, great, and prosperous society depends on ever-widening trust among strangers. It's not blind trust -- ways to hedge against cheaters abound -- but trust is vital. It is as vital as respect for private property and privacy. Like the system of private...

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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