Daily Articles

Disaster Relief, Foreign Aid, and Ukraine

by Laurence M. Vance September 5, 2023

The deadly fire in Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui is the fire seen round the world. The death toll is in the hundreds, with hundreds more still missing and thousands of people evacuated. There is a lot of blame to go around. Progressives are blaming the severity of the fire on climate change. Some people are questioning why ...

America’s Forever Wars Are Not the Problem

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2023

Ever since it became clear that the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were turning into disasters, a common refrain has been to end America’s “forever wars.” Politicians of all political stripes, commentators in the mainstream press, and various conservative and libertarian think tanks and educational foundations have embraced the refrain, thinking that if only America can ...

Macaulay and the Ghosts of Tyranny Past, Part 2

by James Bovard September 1, 2023

Part 1 | Part 2 Reposing with a favorite author in the Virginia Tech library in 1976, I savored one zinger after another in Thomas Macaulay’s History of England. Macaulay hailed the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 as “the most stringent curb that ever legislation imposed on tyranny,” a law that adds to “the security and happiness of every ...

There Is No America First Case for Supporting Ukraine

by Laurence M. Vance September 1, 2023

After the United States foolishly and unnecessarily intervened in World War One — against the warnings of the Founding Fathers about getting involved in European wars — and lost over 116,000 of its young men, American sentiment underwent a shift toward neutrality and nonintervention. With Europe once again embroiled in war beginning in the late 1930s, the America First Committee ...

Thomas Nixon Carver on the Economics of Conflict versus Cooperation

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2023

Human beings have had two fundamental ways of associating with each other: conflict or cooperation. Both methods have run through all recorded human history, as well as long before human beings left intelligible residues of their actions to be deciphered by those who came after them. Group conflicts have seemed to have a variety of causes: religious, political, linguistic, ...

The Myth of NATO as a Defensive Alliance

by Ted Galen Carpenter August 31, 2023

Western leaders have long fostered the self-serving myth that NATO is an organization solely for the mutual defense of its members. The corollary is that other nations therefore have no legitimate reason to fear the most powerful military alliance in history. After all, it is an association of peace-loving democracies. The operational expression of the myth is ...

From Press Room Raids to Indictments, Anything Goes When the Government Piles On

by John W. Whitehead August 23, 2023

“When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.”—Mike Thomas, sports editor What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of ...

Have Religious Conservatives Lost Their Minds?

by Laurence M. Vance August 17, 2023

Although the phrase “separation of church and state” does not appear in the Constitution, the concept is based on the First Amendment, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, ...

Legalize Prostitution

by Walter Block August 7, 2023

If two unmarried consenting adults have sexual relations with each other, in all states but one (Mississippi) they violate no law. Such an act might be considered immoral by some, but that doesn’t mean that it should be a criminal offense. If the man pays the woman for sex with dinners, a movie, flowers, etc. again there is no crime ...

Republicans Miss the Point on Government Regulations

by Laurence M. Vance August 4, 2023

First, they came for our incandescent light bulbs and gas stoves, and now, they are after our water heaters and dishwashers. Back in 2007, President George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act. Among other things, it required greater efficiency for light bulbs, which effectively began the phase-out of the incandescent light ...

To Cure Healthcare, We Need to Kill Government Involvement

by Robert E. Wright August 1, 2023

Most Americans need not have seen the recent headline announcing that Connecticut healthcare insurers seek to raise premiums by over 20 percent to realize that America’s healthcare system is badly broken -- overly expensive and insufficiently healthful. What they have yet to fully grasp is that it’s almost entirely the government’s fault. Instead, many applaud socialized medicine, ...

A Pox on Many Houses in Ukraine

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 2023

When Russia invaded Ukraine, it immediately became an easy decision for today’s interventionists. Their position was both simple and simplistic: Ukraine is a sovereign and independent country. Russia initiated a war against Ukraine by invading the country. Therefore, Russia is bad and should be condemned. Moreover, the U.S. government, as well as NATO, should come to Ukraine’s defense by ...