Daily Articles

Closing Time

by Laurence M. Vance March 12, 2020

The Democratic National Convention — where delegates of the Democratic Party choose their party’s nominees for president and vice president — will be held July 13-16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the Fiserv Forum (where the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks play). This will be the first time that a major political party convention has been held in Milwaukee, which was among ...

Right, Bernie! We Are All (Ersatz) Socialists Now

by David Stockman March 12, 2020

In 1971 Nixon famously said “we are all Keynesians now” as he ash-canned the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard, thereby unleashing fiat central banking on the world economy. At the time, the Keynesian part wasn’t viewed as such a big deal by enlightened opinion. It was supposedly just the Republican Right catching-up with the Great Depression and shedding its vestigial ...

Coronavirus vs. the Mass Surveillance State: Which Poses the Greater Threat?

by John W. Whitehead March 10, 2020

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the ...

What All the Democratic Presidential Candidates Have in Common

by Laurence M. Vance March 6, 2020

And then there were three. The Democratic National Convention will be held July 13-16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A record twenty-nine Democrats formally announced that they were seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Fourteen of them withdrew in 2019. Four of them withdrew in 2020 before the Iowa Democratic caucuses on February 3 (Cory Booker, Julian Castro, John Delaney, Marianne Williamson). Three ...

Liberalism Should Reject Welfare Statism

by Richard M. Ebeling March 5, 2020

Dislike for the personality and disagreement with the policies of Donald Trump have helped to revive a seemingly dead idea: socialism. This has placed friends and defenders of a free society on the defensive in having to make the positive case for free market liberalism. The economic and psychological shocks from the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the emotional distaste ...

So Much for Living the American Dream

by John W. Whitehead March 3, 2020

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist Let’s talk numbers, shall we? The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed ...

Are Uber Drivers Underpaid?

by Laurence M. Vance March 2, 2020

After its initial public offering (IPO) in May 2019, Uber’s shares closed their first day of trading at $41.57 — 7.6 percent below the company’s offering price of $45. On November 6 — the day of the highly anticipated six-month “lockup” period following its IPO ended — early investors and employees looking to sell their stock for a big ...

Socialism in America

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 28, 2020

Lost in the ongoing debate in America as to whether the United States should embrace socialism is a discomforting fact: America embraced socialism a long time ago. The problem is that many Americans have simply not wanted to accept that fact and instead have preferred living a life of denial. A complete socialist system would be one in which the ...

Triple Threat

by Laurence M. Vance February 26, 2020

What do minimum-wage laws, child-labor laws, and overtime-pay laws have in common other than that they originated in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938? The FLSA established a national minimum wage of 25¢ an hour, mandated time-and-a-half for overtime in certain jobs, prohibited most child labor, and established a 44-hour work week, which was lowered to 40 hours ...

The Technocrats Will Not Save Us

by Richard M. Ebeling February 25, 2020

Besides the certainty, as they say, of death and taxes, one other highly likely event will be an end to the general “good times” of relatively low price inflation and low unemployment in America. In other words, the United States will eventually experience worsening inflation at some point, as well as another general economic downturn. The question is, what ...

U.S. Foreign-Policy Perpetual Perfidy

by James Bovard February 24, 2020

The Washington establishment was aghast in October when Donald Trump appeared to approve a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. The United States was seen as abandoning the Kurds, some of whom had assisted the United States in the fight against ISIS and other terrorist groups. But the indignation over the latest U.S. policy shift in the Middle East is ...

Gun-Toting Cops Endanger Students and Turn the Schools into Prisons

by John W. Whitehead February 20, 2020

"Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes Just when you thought the government couldn’t get any more tone-deaf about civil liberties and the growing need to ...