The Fifth Amendment Lies in Crumbles by Jacob G. Hornberger February 25, 2014 The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads in part as follows: Nor shall any person … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The term “due process of law” stretches all the way back to Magna Carta, the great charter extracted from King John in 1215 in which he was forced to acknowledge that his ...
Yawn. Another Big Drug Bust by Jacob G. Hornberger February 24, 2014 U.S. officials and the mainstream press are going gaga over the latest drug kingpin to go down. This one’s name is Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka El Chapo, described by the New York Times in a front-page story today as “the world’s most wanted man – the chief executive of what experts describe as the world’s most sophisticated narcotics ...
On FFF’s Liberal Panel at the SFL Conference by Jacob G. Hornberger February 21, 2014 Among the many articles generated by FFF’s panel at the Students for Liberty conference, which featured noted liberals (i.e., progressives) Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick, and Jeremy Scahill, was one at Mediaite, which included the following: “ISFLC is an annual gathering of several thousand libertarian students from around the world. Scahill bemoaned how many of his liberal Twitter followers ...
Black Teenagers Should Call for Repealing the Minimum Wage by Jacob G. Hornberger February 20, 2014 For the life of me, I simply cannot understand how intelligent people can still support something as nonsensical as a government-established minimum wage. I find this to be absolutely incredible. The very thought that people living in the 21st century can still support such inanity is surely a testament to the destructive power of America’s governmental schooling system. The latest ...
Heading into the Storm by Jacob G. Hornberger February 19, 2014 The debt ceiling was recently raised again, this time without any fanfare among federal officials or their supporters in the mainstream press. The federal government had, once again, reached the maximum limit on the amount of debt it was permitted to incur. Raising the ceiling enables U.S. officials to continue incurring more debt, thereby adding to the enormous pile ...
Continuing the Drug War is Stupid by Jacob G. Hornberger February 18, 2014 I find the mind of a statist to be absolutely fascinating. Consider, for example, an article by a man named Steve Booher, a columnist for the St. Joseph News-Press in St. Joseph, Missouri. The title of the article is “It’s Not Time to End War on Drugs.” Is that amazing or what? Booher actually wants the drug war to ...
Empire vs. Peace, Freedom, Morality, and Prosperity by Jacob G. Hornberger February 17, 2014 The justification that U.S. officials use for their assassination of people overseas, including American citizens, is that the people they’re killing are bent on killing U.S. forces. Thus, the justification is sort of a modified self-defense concept—they’re trying to kill us and so we’re assassinating them before they have a chance to kill us. Most mainstream commentators have come to ...
The Times Just Might Be A’Changin’ by Jacob G. Hornberger February 14, 2014 The New York Times is reporting that most Americans, including a majority in Florida, favor normalizing relations with Cuba, which would mean a lifting of cruel and brutal economic embargo that the U.S. government has been enforcing against the Cuban people for more than 50 years. It’s about time. Maybe Americans are finally figuring out that the embargo is an ...
The Military’s Power to Imprison Americans Is Not Freedom by Jacob G. Hornberger February 13, 2014 I’d venture to say that few Americans know who Jose Padilla is. Nonetheless, Padilla is one of the most important figures in the lives of the American people. It was his case that revolutionized America’s legal system by upholding the power of the military to take American citizens into custody, put them into concentration camps for as long as ...
Embracing Nonintervention and Open Immigration by Jacob G. Hornberger February 12, 2014 One of the libertarian positions that scare some Americans is open immigration. The thought that millions of people from around the world would be free to come to the United States to tour, work, invest, open businesses, or visit people frightens them to death. Actually, however, it’s an irrational fear. Today, there are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in ...
No U.S. Soldier Should Have Died in Korea (or Vietnam) by Jacob G. Hornberger February 11, 2014 As the Los Angeles Times reported, four days before Christmas last year 94-year-old Clara Gantt received the remains of her husband, whom she had married in 1948. Army Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Gantt had gone missing during the Korean War and had always been presumed dead. Although he had told Clara to remarry in the event of his ...
Why Do Progressives Hate Black Teenagers? by Jacob G. Hornberger February 10, 2014 One of the favorite responses of progressives to libertarian calls to dismantle the welfare state is to ask, “Why do you hate the poor?” That question can be modified and turned back on progressives: “Why do you hate black teenagers, the people whom you condemn to unemployment and poverty with your minimum-wage laws?” After all, black teenage unemployment is a ...
