Daily Articles

The Legacy of Thanksgiving Is Free Enterprise

by Richard M. Ebeling November 25, 2020

Thanksgiving is normally a time of family festivities, when relatives and good friends come together for a fine meal, catching up with what has been happening in everyone’s life, and a general good cheer. A month later Christmas and New Year’s brings an end to the old year and the start of another. But things are very different this ...

Diplomatic Impunity

by Michael Tennant November 18, 2020

“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton was quoted as saying in a 1611 book by Caspar Schoppe. Four hundred nine years later, in a Defense One article by Katie Bo Williams, retiring U.S. diplomat Jim Jeffrey turned Wotton’s epigram on its ...

Do Not Trust Governments with the Control of Money

by Richard M. Ebeling November 17, 2020

If there is one thing that is fairly certain in this life – besides the seeming inescapability of death and taxes – is that once someone is appointed to almost any position in the political and bureaucratic structures of a government they soon discover how important and essential is the organization of which they are a part for the ...

End the Government’s War on America’s Military Veterans

by John W. Whitehead November 12, 2020

“For soldiers … coming home is more lethal than being in combat.” ― Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston The 2020 presidential election may be over, but nothing has really changed. The U.S. government still poses the greatest threat to our freedoms. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even ...

Why Politics Breeds Divisive Fears and Angers

by Richard M. Ebeling November 11, 2020

The recent presidential election confirms and reinforces what many political observers and common citizens have increasingly known and noted: Americans are seriously divided over the problems they see facing society, and the means and methods to solve or reduce their impact on all of us. This division of views is, of course, partly shown in the number of votes cast ...

Gridlock Is Good—Except In The Jaws Of Massive Public Debts

by David Stockman November 9, 2020

James Madison is surely smiling from his grave. Pursuant to his constitutional design, last night a badly divided electorate got an utterly  gridlocked government—with the Supreme Court and Senate in the hands of one party  and the House of Representatives and White House marginally in the hands of the  other. That’s as good an RX against tyranny as it gets. Vlad ...

Of Course They Are Unconstitutional

by Laurence M. Vance November 6, 2020

Amy Coney Barrett, a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, became the 103rd associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on October 27, 2020, after she was administered the oath of office by Justice Clarence Thomas and the judicial oath by Chief Justice John Roberts. After the death ...

Lockdowns as a Political Tragedy of the Commons

by Richard M. Ebeling November 4, 2020

Several of the leading European countries are now in the process of implementing a second wave of social and economic lockdowns in the face of new and a rising number of cases of the coronavirus. After bringing their societies to near total halts in the spring of 2020 with lockdowns and shutdowns in the name of “flattening the curve” ...

Libertarianism and Boycotts

by Wendy McElroy November 3, 2020

“There oughta be a law” has become the default position for those seeking social change, and mainstream libertarianism is beginning to forget effective non-legal, non-violent strategies from the past. A powerful one is the boycott. The term “boycott” was coined in 1880 by the Irish Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell to describe a campaign of social and economic ostracism ...

Six Social Security Scams

by Laurence M. Vance November 2, 2020

An article titled “Six Scams that Prey on the Elderly” that appeared on Kiplinger.com last year has recently been reposted on Pocket. Although there is a Social Security scam that the author (Miriam Cross) mentions as one of the six, the fact that Social Security itself is a scam is never ...

COVID-19 and Liberty

by Christine Smith October 30, 2020

If there's one thing we've learned about the public's understanding and practice of liberty from the pandemic, it's that some when pushed to the brink will rebel. Sometimes, for humans to learn, takes a loss of liberty to awaken them. Currently, millions want their states to "open up" while local governments say "no." People lost much during this pandemic: livelihoods, freedom ...

Unmasking Paul Krugman’s Misrepresentation of Ayn Rand

by Richard M. Ebeling October 28, 2020

“How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill?” When New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s article for October 22, 2020 was first posted on the internet that was the title of his piece. Someone at The Times must have had second thoughts about it, because now if you download Krugman’s piece the title has been changed to,