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Sheldon Richman Articles

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...

TGIF: Tariffs Tax Consumers

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 9, 2024

We seem to forget that a tariff is a tax. It is formally levied on importers, not on foreigners or things, but since it can usually be passed along, it ends up as an indirect tax on consumers. The point of tariffs is to protect certain domestic businesses and their...

TGIF: Autocracy — Boo! Democracy — Hiss!

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 2, 2024

Here's why democracy is a dubious idea. Government decisions are high stakes. It decides matters of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, freedom or oppression. Yet we let incompetent people steer the ship of state. Most voters are ignorant and process what little...

TGIF: Without the State, Who’d Drag Us into Other People’s Wars?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 26, 2024

This article was posted shortly before the International Court of Justice ruled provisionally that Israel's Gaza military operation can plausibly be described as acts outlawed by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The ICJ...

TGIF: Milei at Davos

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 19, 2024

Javier Milei, the newly elected president of Argentina, spoke the other day at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF is essentially a group of people who want world affairs centrally planned by political authorities. They are...

TGIF: Smells like Genocide

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 12, 2024

If it looks like genocide, sounds like genocide, and smells like genocide, chances are it's genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule provisionally on whether that is what Israel is committing against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The...

TGIF: The Right to Move

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 5, 2024

If people individually own themselves and have a right to be free of aggressive force, then they have a right to change their location in ways consistent with other people's rights. Whether you call this moving around relocating, emigrating, or immigrating, doesn't...

TGIF: Beware Elitists in Populist Clothing

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 22, 2023

We're led to believe that today's political struggles are largely a contest between populists and elitists. But something besides libertarians is missing from that simple tale: the elitists in populist clothing, or elitist populists. We have no better example than a...

TGIF: Ahad Ha’Am’s Prophetic Warning about Political Zionism

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 15, 2023

Ukrainian-born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), whose pen name was Ahad Ha'Am (Hebrew for one of the people), was a proponent of Spiritual, or Cultural, Zionism, which made him a rival to Theodor Herzl and Political Zionism, the movement dedicated to creating a...

TGIF: Inspiration for the Nakba?

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 8, 2023

The unspeakable violence that plagues Israel and Palestine daily relates in part to the assertion of an ancient, ancestral, and even divinely bestowed property right to a parcel of land, which is often called "holy" and "promised." For background, here are a few...

TGIF: Jewish Dissent on the Balfour Declaration

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 1, 2023

In the fateful year 1917 the British cabinet had one Jewish member: Edwin Montagu. He was also the only cabinet member to oppose the Balfour Declaration of that year, which paved the way for the self-declared creation of the state of Israel, the so-called Jewish...

TGIF: Arms Sales and Democracy

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 24, 2023

The U.S. government's role as the world's premier arms donor and dealer is now under renewed scrutiny. I can't imagine why. But seriously... We may legitimately ask if this role fulfills democracy's promise of, in Lincoln's words, "government of the people, by the...

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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