I wrote this in 2015 to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, or Great Charter. In light of current events—featuring a president who aspires to unchecked power, despairs of the rule of law, and has discussed suspending the right of habeas corpus—the posting of...
As of April 2025, the U.S. national debt stands at a staggering $36.2 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that net interest payments on this debt alone will reach $952 billion in fiscal year 2025—nearly a trillion dollars just to service past...
One of the reasons the American political establishment really hates it when Trump is president is that his administration has a tendency to bring out and exaggerate dynamics at play in Washington DC that the establishment would prefer to keep hidden. One such example...
Editor's note: Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton gave this speech to the Tbilisi Summer Forum on June 6, 2025. No offense, but Georgia’s interests are just none of my affair. It’s such a long way from here. I know my government has been messing around there...
During a recent interview with CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon provided a self-effacing but thoughtful critique of the mainstream media. Unlike Jon Stewart, who famously went on Crossfire in 2004 to call the kettle black, Dillon’s...
Back in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan famously championed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), referred to colloquially as “Star Wars.” Forty years later, in 2025, President Donald Trump has thrown his enthusiastic support behind what is tantamount to a...
Originally tribes of extended families and like-minded individuals joined together to create a community. They were self-governing and consenting associations of individuals, a unified whole. The head patriarch acted as a king, the head of the community, ensuring...
Donald Trump, who returned to the White House on a promise to end the Russo-Ukrainian War, has recently expressed his frustration at how the conflict has played out thus far. In a viral Truth Social post he published on May 25, 2025, Trump manifested his bewilderment...
India’s private education sector remains caught in a legal paradox. While the Constitution permits every citizen the right to practice any profession or carry on any trade or business under Article 19(1)(g), profit-making in education remains legally restricted. This...
A dubious theory held by some libertarians has been knocking about. It goes something like this: The claim that government-controlled land is actually unowned—and thus not properly subject to government rulemaking—would lead to consequences that reasonable people...
When Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Ted Galen Carpenter published America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course Over Taiwan in 2005, it was met with polite attention and quiet dismissal by most of the foreign policy establishment, which at that time was...
Whoever argues in favor of granting rights to animals, has first accepted that humans have rights and believes that animals must also be recognized as subjects of rights. And only someone who has a notion of what having rights means can meaningfully ask for this. Yet...
When Barack Obama bombed Libya in 2011, a number of conservative voices spoke out against the president starting an unconstitutional war. Those Republicans insisted that presidents must go through Congress to declare war, as Article I, Section 8 of the U.S....
An old family home in Washington DC has become the latest center in the battle over home equity theft—a practice where government can legally seize a property to cover an unpaid tax debt, sell it for far more than the amount of the debt, and then keep all the money...
It is not a new thing to try and shame or blackmail an individual into silence. Whether the evidence is real or doctored doesn’t matter; only the judgement of the public is needed to destroy a person's credibility. Governments and criminal organizations have deployed...
