Daily Articles

What Is Missing in the Arguments for Marijuana Legalization

by Laurence M. Vance June 14, 2021

The federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act with “a high potential for abuse,” “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States,” and “a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug under medical supervision.” The possession of even a small amount of marijuana can result in ...

Would the Republicans Have Saved Us?

by Laurence M. Vance June 10, 2021

If Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) had not gotten sick and resigned his Senate seat, then the title of this article would have been “Will the Republicans Save Us?” After serving in the Georgia state house and senate, Isakson served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. He was re-elected in ...

Free Market Liberalism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

by Richard M. Ebeling June 9, 2021

The recent 11 days of warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has once more raised the issue of one-state or two-state “solutions” to the over seven decade Israel-Palestinian conflict. In the long run, neither is a viable option outside of a politics of individual liberty and an economics of free markets. There was a two-state solution laid out in ...

The Conservative Hypocrisy on Menthol Cigarette Ban

by Laurence M. Vance June 7, 2021

Many Americans perhaps don’t realize that Congress gave the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over tobacco in 2009.  Nor do they know that the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (TCA), enacted that same year, banned the sale of flavored tobacco products, with the exception of menthol-flavored cigarettes and flavored cigars. But by now, I suppose that ...

Jacques Novicow, Sociologist of Peace and Freedom

by Richard M. Ebeling June 4, 2021

One of the most important classical liberal crusades of the nineteenth century was to at least tame, if not end, the death and destruction of war. From time immemorial, wars have been the scourge of mankind. Huge numbers of ordinary people have been uprooted from their homes and families to be the human sacrifices in battle to serve the ...

Make Way for the Snitch State

by John W. Whitehead June 3, 2021

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we ...

Inflation Is a Dangerous Way to Get Rid of Debt Burdens

by Richard M. Ebeling June 2, 2021

Suppose you lent someone $100, and when they paid you back they only handed you, say, $99 or $80. Would you consider the borrower to have kept his promise and contractual obligation? Or would you think that he had cheated you out of a part of the money you had lent him in good faith? Well, there are those ...

Will Treason Mania Destroy America?

by James Bovard June 1, 2021

At the start of the Biden era, America is being torn apart by more allegations of treason than at any time since the Civil War. Historian Henry Adams observed a century ago that politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” And few things spur hatred more effectively than tarring all political opponents as traitors. The Founding Fathers carved ...

The Continuing Disaster of the U.S. Drug War in Latin America

by Ted Galen Carpenter May 31, 2021

The following is a statement to the Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission: Charting a New Path Forward, Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, December 3, 2020: I wish to express my appreciation to the chairman and members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs for the opportunity to submit this statement. The Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission is ...

The Paternalist Instincts of a Central Planner

by Richard M. Ebeling May 26, 2021

Both supporters and critics of President Joe Biden have been surprised and amazed by the immensity of his political agenda and his recent actions for a far more expansive role for the federal government than many had been expecting from his time in office. He is clearly on a “mission” and is pursuing it with seeming urgency. So, what ...

Steps Toward Freedom and Away From It

by Laurence M. Vance May 25, 2021

Two things that are near and dear to the hearts of libertarians are the removal of government occupational licensing and the elimination of government involvement in education. Recent events concerning these issues are good examples of steps toward freedom and steps away from it. Licensing An occupational license is simply a certificate of permission and approval from a government-sponsored board that ...

Total Tyranny

by John W. Whitehead May 21, 2021

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford It never fails. Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again. In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that ...