Sheldon | The Libertarian Institute

Sheldon Richman Articles

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...

TGIF: Bigotry versus Social Cooperation

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 17, 2023

We who value individualism, freedom, and social cooperation as essential to flourishing should be distressed by the hostile bigotry that has lately reared its ugly head, to some uncertain extent, on the streets and campuses of America and abroad. This is not new. In...

TGIF: When History Didn’t Begin

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 10, 2023

I agree with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. I've never written those words before. But on Oct 24, Guterres said to the UN Security Council (emphasis added): The situation in the Middle East is growing more dire by the hour. The war in Gaza is raging and risks...

TGIF: The Glorious Bourgeois Peace Movement

by Sheldon Richman | Nov 3, 2023

Those of us whose pro-peace/antiwar principles are of the bourgeois classical-liberal variety need reminding now and again that we have a glorious tradition going back hundreds of years. We need not get lost in the dominant rhetoric that opposes war, empire, and its...

TGIF: Don’t Police the World

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 27, 2023

"We" -- to be precise, U.S. policymakers and their quasi-private-sector, tax-nourished enablers-beneficiaries-- must not police the world, become directly involved in wars, covertly assist belligerents, or act as arms merchants and bankers. The central government...

« Older Entries

Next Entries »

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.

More Info

Coming to Palestine