Advocates of freedom are often called upon to explain why people should be given specific freedoms. Why should people be free to work for less than $7 an hour? Why should people be free to leave their homes during a pandemic? Why should people be free to take drugs? These questions are asked as though until we can prove that an action would provide a net societal benefit, we should not be allowed to take that action. This is exactly backwards. Any restriction upon freedom should require an overwhelming case that it would prevent enormous harm before we consider adopting it. In order to...
Benefits
Ukrainian Military Intelligence Chief Threatens Total “Guerrilla” Warfare
The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, threatened total “guerrilla” warfare in Russian-occupied territory. He also warned Moscow was attempting to split his country into a divided state. Budanov said that Ukraine was preparing a guerrilla war in any territory Russia continues to control. "The season of a total Ukrainian guerilla safari will soon begin," he said. The statement from the intel chief comes as the US is dumping billions of insurgency-style weapons into Ukraine. The American weapon’s shipments to Keiv included the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile that...
UN Human Rights Report Says Israel Guilty of ‘Apartheid’
The UN’s human rights body has accused Israel of the “crime of apartheid,” saying it has established a “regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination” against Palestinians.
A Solution to Transgender Sports
Even in these politically divisive times, this headline fairly leaps off the page at you: “Texas Passes Bill Barring Sports for Transgender Students.” According to Texas State House Representative Valoree Swanson, a sponsor of this bill, it is “all about girls and protecting them” in the state’s University Interscholastic League. She continued: “We need a statewide level playing field…It’s very important that we, who got elected to be here, protect our girls.” This seems a bit unfair to a small group of marginalized students, but we all know the genesis of this initiative: boys with...
DECLASSIFIED: CIA Assassination Manual (1953)
https://youtu.be/73Sq50YKR5c ...the conspiracy theorist asks himself the question cui bono? Who benefits from this measure? If he finds that Measure A benefits X and Y, his next step is to investigate the hypothesis: did X and Y in fact lobby or exert pressure for the passage of Measure A? In short, did X and Y realize that they would benefit and act accordingly? Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Murray...
Lunatic With a Plan: Erdogan and Turkey’s Economic Woes
Since the first assault on Turkey’s finances in 2018, which I wrote about multiple times (here, here, and here), I’ve been the lone voice telling everyone that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a lunatic but he’s a lunatic with a plan. That plan is to de-dollarize the economy of a valuable member of NATO geostrategically. Since the first shots across the bow by the Trump administration at Erdogan’s toying with those powers east of the Bosporus (Russia, China and Iran) the Turkish lira has been the primary mode of attack against Erdogan. Erdogan has pursued what has been deemed unorthodox...
10/4/21 Scott’s Debate with Bill Kristol
On Monday, October 4th, Scott took part in a debate organized by Gene Epstein. Scott’s opponent was neoconservative Bill Kristol, one of the most prominent war hawks of recent American history. The resolution they debated was: A willingness to intervene, and seek regime change, is key to an American foreign policy that benefits America. The event was filmed by Reason TV so the video version can be found on their Youtube Channel. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom;...
Automation: A Luddite’s Dystopia and the Future of Work
Andrew Yang ran his presidential campaign on the promise of providing American citizens with a monthly stipend to counter the effects of job loss. According to Yang, “up to 30% of jobs are at risk of automation.” The fear of the impact of new technologies is nothing new. The nineteenth century had its Luddites, a group of workers that took to smashing early industrial looms and other machinery in which they saw a threat to manual labor jobs. Technophobia is a retrograde and reactionary idea that continues to be popular, and as history shows, it is not justified. It is easy to imagine the...
Forever Soldiers To Fight Forever Wars
The U.S. military says it is months away from launching clinical trials of a pill designed to block or reduce many degenerative effects of aging—an oral treatment that a leading researcher in the field says is better than nothing while questioning how effective it will ultimately prove. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM)—which develops and employs Special Operations Forces worldwide to advance U.S. policies and objectives—has “completed preclinical safety and dosing studies in anticipation of follow-on performance testing” of a first-in-class nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide,...
SWAT Destroys Innocent Woman’s Home, Sends Her the Bill
In July of last year, Vicki Baker, 75, was excited to move on to the next chapter of her life in Montana by selling her home she owned for 12 years in McKinney, Texas. That sale would never take place on schedule, however, because the day before she was supposed to close, a SWAT team destroyed it. Baker was out of town on July 25 of last year but her daughter was home when a distraught construction worker — who had worked on the home before — decided to invade the home. Wesley Little, 50, had holed up in the home along with a 15-year-old girl he had abducted. When he came in the home,...