Daily Articles

The Question Never Asked about Federal Lands

by Laurence M. Vance July 9, 2020

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), known as the Government Accounting Office until 2004, “is an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress.” It is headed by the Comptroller General of the United States. The GAO likes to be called the “congressional watchdog” because it “examines how taxpayer dollars are spent and provides Congress and federal ...

Liberty Is the Theme of the American Spirit

by Richard M. Ebeling July 8, 2020

July is the month when Americans celebrate the signing and then the announcement of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. While this July 4th was one of the most peculiar in the country’s history because of fears about and government restrictions on social gatherings due to the coronavirus, it is nonetheless one of the great cultural events ...

Seattle Gets It Half Right

by Laurence M. Vance July 7, 2020

The city of Seattle City Council has voted to strike down its drug-traffic and prostitution loitering laws. The vote was unanimous. I should emphasize that it is not drug-traffic and prostitution laws that were struck down, just drug-traffic and prostitution loitering laws. At least the Seattle City Council got it half right. According to Title 12A, Subtitle I, Chapters 12A.10 ...

Ad Hominems Against Freedom

by Richard M. Ebeling July 2, 2020

Statues are historical symbols of people and events from the past, and as such they reflect the heritage and values of a country. In the heightened current racial tensions in the United States, demonstrators and vandals have insisted that monuments glorifying the Confederacy and the old slave South must come down. But this challenge and attack against America’s past, in ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 2

by Danny Sjursen July 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 The Constitution was, and is, emphatic on one matter, at least: only Congress possesses the power to declare war. In the 1840s, an era of legislative preeminence, even the high-risk ...

Liberal Democracy versus Democratic Socialism versus Social Democracy

by Richard M. Ebeling June 30, 2020

The presidential primary campaign of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination and the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress from New York have once again raised the issue of the desirability for and the possibility of a system of “democratic socialism.” For many of their critics and opponents the operative word is “socialism” in their vision of a new ...

Democrats, Republicans, and the Constitution

by Laurence M. Vance June 29, 2020

In July 2017, after President Donald Trump had been in office for less than six months, Congressmen Al Green (D-Calif.) and Brad Sherman (D-Tex.) introduced in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives an article of impeachment (H. Res. 438) against the president for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Said Green, “I am introducing Articles of Impeachment to begin a long ...

Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid

by James Bovard June 26, 2020

Foreign aid to Ukraine helped spur the Democrats’ effort to impeach and remove President Trump earlier this year. Ukraine was supposed to be on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by U.S. government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid ...

Religion and Education in a Free Society

by Laurence M. Vance June 25, 2020

Montgomery County, Maryland, which lies just outside of Washington, D.C., is one of America’s richest and most populous counties. It is also home to the largest school system in Maryland and fourteenth-largest in the United States. For the current school year (2019-2020), the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system has 208 schools, more than 165,000 students, more than 24,000 ...

The Meaning and the Mind of an American

by Richard M. Ebeling June 23, 2020

One of the continuing and burning issues in America today is determining how we view ourselves and how we view others, including in matters of race. Are we individual human beings who may or may not have by the accidents of birth particular racial and biological characteristics, or do we have certain racial and biological characteristics that determine and ...

Fifty Years of Statist Policies and Economic Fallacies

by Richard M. Ebeling June 22, 2020

It is about fifty years since, as an undergraduate, I took my first economics classes in college. Virtually all my professors were adamant that unrestrained market capitalism was unworkable, and on the way out. Planning, many of them said, was the future for complex societies and economic development. Like “deva vu, all over again,” the same claims are being ...

Qualified Immunity Is How the Police State Stays in Power

by John W. Whitehead June 18, 2020

What’s been most striking to me is just how one-sided the rules are when Americans take on their own government…. It has been dismaying to learn the extent to which rules and laws shield the government from accountability for its abuses—or even lawbreaking…. It’s been a long and frightening lesson…. The rules seem rigged to protect government lawlessness, and ...