Legacy Links

Macroeconomics as Coordination

by Alexander William Salter April 1, 2013

If your main source of economic information is a newspaper, television news station, or government statistical bureau, you would probably say that macroeconomics is the discipline that studies a handful of aggregate data series, such as consumption, investment, government spending, and total income, for the purpose of understanding the causal relationships among them. The reason people pay attention to ...

Eliminate Medicine Shortages with Imports

by Fergus Hodgson November 4, 2011

Pharmaceutical drugs are in scant supply in the United States relative to their demand — a “serious and growing threat to public health,” says President Obama’s latest executive order. The number of prescription-drug shortages, the order continues, has almost tripled in the past five years, and half of pharmacists and purchasing agents are utilizing “gray-market” dealers. According to ...

No End to the Shameful Treatment of Omar Khadr

by Andy Worthington November 1, 2011

This week, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner, was supposed to leave Guantánamo after nine years and three months in U.S. custody. No one thought that he would return to Canada as a free man because he has another seven years to serve in a Canadian jail as part of a plea deal he made at ...

Taxing the Rich

by Laurence M. Vance October 26, 2011

President Obama’s American Jobs Act of 2011 (S.1660) recently went down to defeat in the Senate. Two Democrats joined with all forty-six voting Republicans (Sen. Tom Coburn did not vote) to kill the $447 billion plan. The most egregious part of this bill was that it “amends the Internal Revenue Code to impose on individual taxpayers in taxable years ...

Would McCain Have Been Any Better?

by Laurence M. Vance October 20, 2011

It has been said that every president makes us nostalgic for his predecessor. But as bad as the presidency of Barack Obama has turned out to be, I still look back on the Bush years with regret rather than longing. George Bush will go down in history — at least among proponents of liberty, property, and peace — as one ...

The American Nightmare That Is Civil Asset Forfeiture

by Wendy McElroy October 18, 2011

Being innocent does not matter. Not being arrested or convicted of a crime is no protection. With amazing ease, the government can take everything you own. And to recover it, you must prove your innocence through an expensive and difficult court proceeding in which a severely lowered standard of evidence favors the government. This is civil asset forfeiture.

A Call to Close Guantánamo on the 10th Anniversary of the War in Afghanistan

by Andy Worthington October 13, 2011

As the war in Afghanistan begins its second decade, the reasons for it to be brought to an end are compelling: the ruinous financial cost ($460 billion and counting), the ruinous human cost (over 1,400 U.S. military deaths , and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed), and the utter pointlessness of the occupation itself. Having driven ...

Guantánamo: Military Commissions and the Illusion of Justice

by Andy Worthington September 30, 2011

When something is irredeemably broken, the sensible course of action is to get rid of it. However, when it comes to military trials for terror suspects in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” however broken the system is, government officials and lawmakers have repeatedly gathered round to put it back together again, and continue to do so, even though, ...

U.S. Injustice Laid Bare, As Afghan in Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Appeal

by Andy Worthington September 23, 2011

Ten years after the “War on Terror” began, the distressing misconceptions and exaggerations on which it was founded continue to plague its victims — and also to corrode America’s belief that it is a nation founded on justice and the law. Ten years ago, Congress launched this “war,” approving the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a ...

After Ten Years of the War on Terror, Its Time to Scrap the Authorization for Use of Military Force

by Andy Worthington September 16, 2011

Many Americans probably think that the “War on Terror” began on September 11, 2001, when the terrible terrorist attacks took place, whose tenth anniversary has recently been marked. However, the “War on Terror” actually began on September 14, 2001, when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which authorized the president “to use all necessary and ...

Endless Evil: The Drug Wars Continuing Collateral Damage, Part 2

by Radley Balko September 15, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 “The Fourth Amendment has been virtually repealed by court decisions,” Yale law professor Steven Duke told Wired magazine in 2000, “most of which involve drug searches.” The rise of no-knock raids and SWAT teams is one example (discussed in part one of this series), but there are others. James Bovard once wrote, for example, of the almost comically ...

Ten Years After 9/11, America Deserves Better than Dick Cheney’s Self-Serving Autobiography

by Andy Worthington September 9, 2011

On August 30, when In My Time, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s self-serving autobiography was published, the timing was pernicious. Cheney knows by now that every time he opens his mouth to endorse torture or to defend Guantánamo, the networks welcome him, and newspapers lavish column inches on his opinions, even though astute editors and programmers must ...