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Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: Governments Create Problems; Markets Fix Them

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 14, 2022

My article "Complete Liberalism" prompted an unexpected challenge. An interlocutor, who says he owns a business and thus is not antibusiness, claimed that my article suggested that, unlike government regulators, businesses never get things wrong. Yet business failures...

TGIF: How the State Violated Free Speech during the Pandemic

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 7, 2022

Is anyone shocked by this observation? Public statements, emails, and recent publicly released documents establish that the President of the United States and other senior officials in the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by directing social-media...

TGIF: The Scourge of Conscription

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 30, 2022

By now Randolph Bourne's observation that "war is the health of the state" ought to be such a cliche that it would hardly need to be said. And yet, it must be said -- often -- because many still haven't gotten the word. If the state is the adversary of liberty, as it...

TGIF: Sam Harris on Saving Democracy from Voters

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 23, 2022

Neuroscientist/philosopher Sam Harris caused quite a stir recently by defending the social networks' conspiracy (his word) to suppress news coverage of Joe Biden's son Hunter's smoking-gun laptop shortly before Election Day 2020. Harris said the suppression was...

TGIF: Question Intuition!

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 16, 2022

In the 1960s a popular button that New Left activists wore implored everyone to "Question Authority!" It was good advice, even though many kinds of authority exist. Some authority is chosen (for example, one's doctor) and others are compulsory (the government). But in...

TGIF: Reject Both Identity and Egalitarian Politics

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 9, 2022

The push-back against identity politics by disillusioned leftists is welcome, but the striving to replace identity with economic equality as the guiding political principle? Not so much. I won't spend time on the problems with identity politics, a zero-sum game if...

TGIF: National Conservatism’s Ominous Economics

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 2, 2022

National conservatism is objectionable on many counts -- the name in itself tells you that -- but it does pay tribute to free enterprise. A closer look, however, may cause one to doubt its commitment. The movement's official Statement of Principles includes Principle...

TGIF: Jefferson on Not Trusting the State

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 26, 2022

Regardless of written constitutions and the laws on the books, individual liberty is always at risk. And as liberty goes, so goes our capacity to live well, to achieve the good life as rational, virtuous social beings. The danger comes from left and right, both of...

TGIF: The Coming New and Improved IRS

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 19, 2022

The brilliant people in the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have decided that one thing America really needs is an Internal Revenue Service (!) fortified by 87,000 more employees and 80 billion more dollars so it can help reduce the inflation that currently...

TGIF: About Those January 6 Committee Extravaganzas

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 5, 2022

I admit it: I watched nearly every moment of the House committee extravaganzas on the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. I did more than that. I was transfixed. I couldn't even multitask. Were the mislabeled "hearings" beyond all criticism? Of course not. They were...

TGIF: The Limits of Ideology

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 29, 2022

I have defended the idea of ideology per se and have disparaged the idea that anyone can operate without an ideology. The self-proclaimed non-ideological person is really one who has an implicit and therefore unexamined or underexamined ideology. No one really judges...

TGIF: Complete Liberalism

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 22, 2022

Many people formerly of the left, who have bid good riddance to their former political home, believe they can retain the mantle of authentic liberalism while ignoring its free-market component. They don't want socialism, and they appropriately dislike the right-wing....

TGIF: Social Order through Liberty

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 15, 2022

Human beings are self-actualizing social animals. We need to cooperate with others to flourish fully and (but?) we also need the freedom to make of ourselves the persons we wish to be; we need autonomy. Can we do both liberty and social order? The answer is yes, and...

TGIF: Why Can’t You Shout “Fire!” in the Virtual Public Square?

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 8, 2022

Almost 10 years ago the free-speech champion Trevor Timm, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the time and now with the Free of the Press Foundation, implored readers "to stop using the ‘fire in a crowded theater’ quote" to justify limits on free expression....

TGIF: Abortion Rights v. Abortion Permissions

by Sheldon Richman | Jul 1, 2022

Even if you cringe at last week's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, it would be wrong to say that the five Supreme Court justices took away women's right to have abortions. I say this because the Supreme Court, unfortunately, never actually recognized a...

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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

Book Animalssm

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