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Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: The Economic Is Personal

by Sheldon Richman | May 24, 2024

Contrary to accepted doctrine, we have no grounds for regarding so-called economic liberties as less important or less worthy of protection than so-called personal, or civil, liberties. That's because we have no essential grounds for distinguishing so-called economic...

TGIF: The Nonsense of Statist Political Economy

by Sheldon Richman | May 17, 2024

In the video "How Capitalism Makes You Less Free," self-described Marxist Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom, boldly asserts that all societies must have some kind of economic planning. That's...

TGIF: What Is Self-Determination?

by Sheldon Richman | May 10, 2024

People go on quite a bit about self-determination these days. Some decry the denial of self-determination to "the Palestinians." Others insist that only "the Jewish people" can have the right to self-determination between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea....

TGIF: Another Bogus Antisemitism Scare

by Sheldon Richman | May 3, 2024

I've been watching and thinking about the nationwide campus antiwar demonstrations in support of the suffering Palestinians of Gaza, and the appalling reaction to and "coverage" of those events. Something important needs to be addressed. I won't be concerned here with...

TGIF: Spooner versus bin Laden

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 26, 2024

In his 2002 letter to America justifying the savage 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (himself killed in 2011) wrote after listing his grievances against the U.S. government: You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against...

TGIF: Thomas Szasz – Unappreciated Libertarian

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 19, 2024

I maintain that mental illness is a metaphorical disease: that bodily illness stands in the same relation to mental illness as a defective television set stands to a bad television program. There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. --Thomas...

TGIF: Why Isn’t Antifa Marching for Apple?

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 12, 2024

I was all ready to don a black mask for the Antifa demonstration when I realized that the self-styled antifascists hadn't planned a demonstration. What are they waiting for? After all, the national government has just started a new fascistic crusade. You'd expect the...

TGIF: Static Analysis Clouds Immigration Debate

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 5, 2024

Opponents of people's freedom to cross national borders to where the best jobs are, aka open borders, make a rookie error: they engage in static analysis and overlook the dynamism of social processes that freedom produces. I was recently asked on Facebook: "Are you...

TGIF: Israel Humiliated

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 29, 2024

To more fully understand the ferocity of Israel's massacre of the people of the Gaza Strip, it's perhaps worth considering that on October 7, 2023, the reputedly invincible Israeli Defence Forces and intelligence services were made to look like fools caught sleeping...

TGIF: Leave TikTok Alone

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 22, 2024

This is America, last I checked. Surely, the government would not force the sale of a social-media company or ban its app from the Google and Apple stores. Would it? Well, yes, it would, could (perhaps), and might. A bill in Congress, backed by the government's...

TGIF: Reverse Scapegoating in the Immigration Debate

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 15, 2024

In the controversy over immigration we can spot a phenomenon I call "reverse scapegoating." According to Merriam-Webster, the scapegoat is "one that bears the blame for others." With reverse scapegoating, others bear the blame for one. Both are unjust. Reverse...

TGIF: Is Israel Mad?

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 8, 2024

Has Israel gone mad? Or has it always been mad? What is the country thinking? The collective nouns seem reasonable in light of the widespread support in that country for the Israeli government's appalling military assault on the people of the Gaza Strip for the last...

TGIF: Immigration in an Nth-Best World

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 1, 2024

We live in an nth-best society. It's neither fully libertarian (though libertarians disagree over exactly what that would mean) nor totalitarian like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, or North Korea. It's somewhere in between, closer to...

TGIF: What Should I Do on Election Day?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 23, 2024

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. --H. L. Mencken This column was prompted by a conversation I had with a few neighbors, whom I do not know, over the Nextdoor.com platform. I thank them for being...

TGIF: Trump Loves NATO

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 16, 2024

Trump is either contentedly ignorant of the things he talks about or callously scornful of his adoring fans, whom he sees as rubes eager to swallow whatever he says. He could be both. Above all, Trump is a Trump supremacist. Does he believe in NATO or not? (Believe in...

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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