Sheldon Richman's TGIF

TGIF: Lysander Spooner on the National Debt

by Sheldon Richman September 27, 2013

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling — or, as I call it, the debt sky, because apparently the sky is the limit — the government won’t be able to pay all its bills starting October 17. The Congressional Budget Office says that dire condition won’t set in until sometime ...

TGIF: The People Say No to War

by Sheldon Richman September 13, 2013

The Constitution did not keep President Obama from attacking Syria. The people did. Think about that. Obama, his top advisers, and many of his partisans and opponents in Congress insist that the president of the United States has the constitutional authority to attack another country without a declaration of war or so-called “authorization for the use of military force” even ...

TGIF: The Cynical U.S. Policy on Chemical Weapons

by Sheldon Richman September 6, 2013

“I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.” That was President Obama’s response this week to those who believe he wants to attack Syria in order to defend his own credibility. Secretary of State John Kerry said the same thing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They were referring to the 88-year-old

TGIF: Heroic

by Sheldon Richman August 23, 2013

Bradley Manning (who wishes to be known as Chelsea Manning) sure was naïve. During the sentencing phase of Manning’s court martial, Alexa O’Brien reports, a forensic psychiatrist said, Well, Pfc Manning was under the impression that his leaked information was going to really change how the world views the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and future ...

TGIF: The Phony Trade-off between Privacy and Security

by Sheldon Richman August 16, 2013

Most people take it for granted — because they’ve heard it so many times from politicians and pundits — that they must trade some privacy for security in this dangerous world. The challenge, we’re told, is to find the right “balance.” Let’s examine this. On its face the idea seems reasonable. I can imagine hiring a firm to look after ...

TGIF: Truman, A-Bombs, and the Killing of Innocents

by Sheldon Richman August 9, 2013

Sixty-eight years ago today a president of the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a city full of innocent Japanese. It was the second time in three days that Harry Truman had done such a thing: He had bombed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The fatalities in the two cities totaled 150,000–246,000. The victims – mostly children, ...

TGIF: Frédéric Bastiat and Subjective Marginal Utility

by Sheldon Richman August 2, 2013

In the 1870s economics took a radical turn in what is known as the “marginal revolution.” Whereas the classical economists, beginning with Adam Smith, cleaved use-value from exchange-value and thought in terms of the total utility and total supplies of goods, Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras realized that people act at the margin. They never choose ...

TGIF: James Madison: Father of the Implied-Powers Doctrine

by Sheldon Richman July 26, 2013

James Madison famously wrote in Federalist 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined.” Strict constructionists are fond of this quote, and often cite it in defense of their view that the Constitution established a government of strictly limited powers. But did it? One way to approach ...

TGIF: What an Honest Conversation about Race Would Look Like

by Sheldon Richman July 19, 2013

Ever since George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin hit the national headlines last year, calls for an “honest conversation about race” have been heard throughout America. (Up until then, apparently, we’ve had only conversations about having a conversation about race.) However, one need not believe that the Zimmerman shooting and verdict were about race — I watched the ...

TGIF: Airbrushing Barbarity

by Sheldon Richman July 5, 2013

“As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person – so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be ...

TGIF: Is Edward Snowden a Lawbreaker?

by Sheldon Richman June 28, 2013

Most people believe that Edward Snowden, who has confirmed that the U.S. government spies on us, broke the law. Even many of his defenders concede this. While in one sense the statement “Snowden broke the law” may be trivially true, in another, deeper sense it is untrue. He may  have violated the terms of legislation passed by Congress and signed ...

TGIF: National Servitude

by Sheldon Richman June 21, 2013

To make citizens, we must facilitate the shared experiences that cultivate civic pride and responsibility. This should mean a period of full-time national service as a rite of passage for every young American, ages 18 to 28. Such service could be military or civilian. Young adults could choose the Army or Peace Corps, Marine Corps or AmeriCorps, the Navy or ...