Last Monday, a bipartisan group of Senators and a coalition including libertarian and progressive activists thwarted a scheme to ram through the Senate legislation renewing three provisions of the USA FREEDOM Act (previously known as the USA PATRIOT Act). The bill had...
We often hear people referred to as “Hamiltonians.” But that term always makes me wonder, which Hamilton do you mean? I recently had the opportunity to speak to a class at the West Virginia University School of Law. The subject was the constitutionality of federal...
The great Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises wrote: "History is a struggle between two principles, the peaceful principle, which advances the development of trade, and the militarist-imperialist principle, which interprets human society not as a friendly division of...
Marbury v. Madison took the written U.S. Constitution and superseded it with a British style system of an unwritten constitutionality. This was judicial review and it lasted until the New Deal when the jurisprudence of limited government figured out that the...
In his book "Liberty in Peril," Randall Holcombe challenges the presumption that liberty and democracy are complementary. When I took history and government in school, many critical issues were misrepresented, given short shrift, or even ignored entirely. And those...
When the New York Federal Reserve began pumping billions of dollars a day into the repurchasing (repo) markets (the market banks use to make short-term loans to each other) in September, they said this would only be necessary for a few weeks. Yet, last Wednesday,...
Perpetual war and aggressive interventionism have become the hallmark of Republican foreign policy. But war is not a conservative thing. Last month, I saw somebody assert unironically and in complete seriousness that Californians need to reelect Rep. Maxine Waters...
The US Constitution never granted the federal government authority to create a central bank. The Founders, having lived through hyperinflation themselves, understood that government should never have a printing press at its disposal. But from the very beginning...
