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Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: Condemning Tyranny Abroad and War

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 9, 2023

Can foreign-policy noninterventionists publicly criticize foreign tyrannies without giving credence to the war party? Yes -- if they try. At least I hope so. Being a noninterventionist does not require agnosticism about, much less approval of, despotic regimes. U.S....

TGIF: Immigration and Liberty

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 2, 2023

Forbidding freedom of movement to aspiring migrants strikes at the liberty not only of those individuals but also of citizens and legal residents of the United States. That's the way it is with immigration. Indeed, that's the way it is with freedom. The government...

TGIF: The Knowledge that Only Free Markets Disclose

by Sheldon Richman | May 26, 2023

As a follow-up to my recent article about F. A. Hayek's classic article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), I thought it worth extending Hayek's exploration of this area of social theory. In 1968 the Nobel laureate-economist delivered a lecture in German known...

TGIF: No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy

by Sheldon Richman | May 19, 2023

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says "no one has a right to immigrate" to the United States. "We determine as Americans," he says, "what type of immigration system benefits our country. When you're doing immigration, it's not for their benefit as foreigners. It's for your...

TGIF: Ducking Hayek

by Sheldon Richman | May 12, 2023

May 8 marked the 124th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel-winning economist of the Austrian school. (He died in 1992.) That makes it a good time to acknowledge one of his many contributions, his epistemic case for the free and competitive market...

TGIF: Abolish Billionaires?

by Sheldon Richman | May 5, 2023

Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to abolish billionaires. You read that right. He says he'd confiscate 100 percent of people's money above the $999 million mark -- as if that would cover a significant portion of the nearly $7 trillion the feds will spend in the next fiscal...

TGIF: Free Markets and the Pursuit of Happiness

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 28, 2023

For some time now I've thought that many people's antagonism to the market is motivated not by moral or economic objections but by aesthetic criteria. (I discuss this in What Social Animals Owe to Each Other and here.) By that I mean they simply find market relations...

TGIF: Politics Corrupts Money

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 21, 2023

Money does not corrupt politics. Politics corrupts money. Politics as we know it is inherently corrupt; it's the way to select government officials, who then use the legalized threat of physical force, and force itself, to make peaceful people do or not do things...

TGIF: Has Libertarianism Passed Its Sell-By Date?

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 14, 2023

Ron DeSantis, who could be the next president of the United States, made his views frighteningly clear: "We understand that freedom is not just about the absence of restrictions.... I think we have to understand that the threats to freedom are not simply as a result...

TGIF: Let’s NOT Go to War with China

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 7, 2023

The word that strikes fear in the power elite is China. It's not fear of an existential threat; rather it's fear that America is becoming second fiddle in world politics. As a result, some believe, or say they believe, that war with China is inevitable. For them,...

TGIF: Beware of All Tribalism

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 17, 2023

Tribalism is bad. Sensible people will know what I mean by tribe. It's not a club based on some common preference like stamp collecting or bowling or cooking. It's more than that. It involves a judgment-suspending commitment. Nationalism is a good example. Tribalism...

TGIF: Hear, O Israel — Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 10, 2023

An older generation of Americans, including Jewish Americans, admire the colonists who resisted the British king and parliament in the late 1700s. Jewish Americans go further and admire the Judeans who revolted against the Greeks and Romans (twice) in antiquity. So...

TGIF: Which Way — Capitalism, Socialism, or Something Else?

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 3, 2023

Big questions are being thrashed out these days. One of the biggest is this: do we want capitalism or socialism? Unfortunately, the online discussions I've witnessed have been, to put it as politely as I can, terrible. (For an example, see this one between Reason...

TGIF: Immigration Foes, What’s the Beef?

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 24, 2023

If people are going to hate on immigrants, they should at least get their stories straight. Do immigrants take our jobs or do they sponge off us through welfare? Today, let's talk about jobs. Recently I was listening to Spiked's Brendan O'Neill interview Batya...

TGIF: Fins Left, Right, and Center

by Sheldon Richman | Feb 17, 2023

Th[e] central question is not clarified, it is obscured, by our common political categories of left, right, and center. --Carl Oglesby, Containment and Change You got fins to the left, fins to the right And you're the only bait in town. --Jimmy Buffett, "Fins"...

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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