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Sheldon Richman Articles

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...

TGIF: Parents Should Govern Their Kids’ Education

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 24, 2022

How clear are these opening words of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”? Judging by the U.S. Supreme Court's many ventures into this area, we'd have to say not very clear...

TGIF: Free Exchange Is Win-Win

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 17, 2022

With the possible exception of the political class and its cronies, most of us would be healthier, wealthier, happier, and freer if the public knew how to engage in "the economic way of thinking." The late Paul Heyne, who wrote a popular textbook by that name (now in...

TGIF: The Libertarian Solution

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 10, 2022

"What's the libertarian solution to social or economic problem X? How about problem Y or Z?" No libertarian needs to wait long before hearing such questions. But strictly speaking, the libertarian philosophy offers no solutions to specific problems. That's not what it...

TGIF: Heartless Immigration Restrictions Need Replacing

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 3, 2022

Some elements of the right-wing are spreading the fear that Democrats are engineering a take-over of America by replacing white voters with nonwhites through liberal immigration policies. It's come to be known as "the great replacement," and in its ugliest form, it is...

TGIF: Glenn Loury’s Collectivist Immigration Policy

by Sheldon Richman | May 27, 2022

Glenn Loury, the economist at Brown University, often has interesting things to say. His YouTube Glenn Show episodes with linguist and social commentator John McWhorter feature valuable insights and eye-opening data about race, woke "anti-racism," and related matters....

TGIF: True Liberals Are Not Conservatives

by Sheldon Richman | May 20, 2022

The relevance of F. A. Hayek's essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative," the postscript to his important 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, is demonstrated at once by the opening quote from Lord Acton: At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its...

TGIF: Alito’s Challenge to Libertarians

by Sheldon Richman | May 13, 2022

In his recently leaked first draft of an opinion that would reverse the abortion-rights cases Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gives Americans a choice between judges who read their personal preferences into the...

TGIF: Mask Mandate – Liberty Can Hang on One Word

by Sheldon Richman | May 6, 2022

As I mentioned recently, whether the courts protect or violate liberty in any given case is something of a coin toss. The matter could hinge on a single word. We just had a good example of that fact. On April 18 U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a Trump...

TGIF: What Really Protects Liberty?

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 29, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, as if we needed another demonstration, that little stands between the government and our liberty. Champions of individual freedom have been properly disturbed by how much power governments at all levels have seized since the...

TGIF: NATO and Collective Insecurity

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 22, 2022

Collective security, the official goal of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, seems plausible on its face. A group of nations ostensibly concerned about a common threat agree to defend one another in the event of an attack. "All for one and one for all," as...

TGIF: Shades of Gray in the Russia-Ukraine War

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 15, 2022

If you're looking for morality tales — clashes between the clearly good and the clearly bad — I suggest you look elsewhere than to the geopolitical theater. There we find only conflicts between shades of darker gray. This seems to have been the case throughout...

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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