Obama is not a dumb man. He understands that government provisioning generally produces a worse service than private organizations which are dependent on people choosing to patronize them. Here he is pointing out that while Fedex is required by law to charge higher prices than the Post Office for equivalent services, it is the Post [...]

Until 1960 or so, the percentage of people getting college degrees was relatively low. There was plenty of work for people who had ‘merely’ graduated from high school, and a high school graduate could support a family. Then came the Vietnam War, where the United States government would happily enslave high-school graduates, but not students [...]

On the Liberty Papers, much of what we write is negative; decrying the steady movement towards tyranny and totalitarianism that is the trajectory of the U.S.. Occasionally, we get to report some good news.Harold Fish has been released from jail. His case is an important one; the state of Arizona charged him with murder for [...]

At Cafe Hayek, a letter to the editor by Andy Morriss to the Wall Street Journal is posted: Holman Jenkins asks “Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?” (Business World, July 8). I am sure he does not. Rather than own them, the president and his congressional allies want to control the airlines — a [...]

THIS BOOK IS BASED on a single idea: You should be allowed to do whatever you want with your own person and property, as long as you don’t physically harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other. Thus begins a book that everyone interested in politics should read; Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The [...]

One of the most pernicious beliefs held by Americans is the conflation of the state with society. This belief is causing them acquiesce to government actions that threaten the destruction of American civilization if not stopped. The word society comes to us from the Latin societas, which meant a group of people bound by friendship [...]

The purpose of society is to help people satisfy their needs. A major means used to satisfy needs are economic activities such as production, trade, and the performance of services. In a complex economy, it is easy to lose sight of this, and people begin to believe the fallacy that the purpose of an economy [...]

Over at the Master Resource Blog,  law professor Gail Heriot points out the similarities between global warming, fear-monger Al Gore and Xhosa Prophetess Nongqawuse: Nongqawuse was a teenager and a member of the Xhosa tribe in South Africa.  One day in April or May of 1856, she went down to the river to fetch water.  [...]

This evening, we had our 30,000th comment here on the Liberty Papers. On behalf of all of us who post here, I’d like to thank you, our audience, for your feedback, arguments, discussions, and explanations. You, our readers, are why we write. Thanks for reading.

According to the Iranian government, the person dying below was a terrorist. No doubt all the people walking around her in apparent unconcern for there were fellow terrorists, and the people she was terrorizing were outside camera range. She is being called Neda. The person who uploaded the video to Youtube claims that he was [...]

Judging from his statements and the note he left in his car, James von Brunn walked into the Holocaust Museum believing that he was about to strike a blow against Jewish world hegemony and Federal gun-control.  Even by his twisted standards, his actions were counterproductive. His plan was to massacre people visiting and working at [...]

The Democrats are steamrolling over all opposition, putting bad idea after bad idea into practice. The Republican Party is in no position to stop them, and their impotence has everything to do with their ideological bankruptcy during the Bush years. At its heart, the  Republican Party was dominated by mercantilists, people who believe in big [...]

Since Barack Obama has decided to continue down the path George Bush started down,  the path of Robert Mugabe and Friedrich Ebert, the United States economy will soon be facing all the problems associated with inflation. Unfortunately, the effects of inflation are poorly popularized, meaning that most people have a very limited understanding of inflation.  [...]

On this website, we have a category called “Dumbasses & Authoritarians” that is a grab bag of stories about really dumb or vicious government officials. Typically, the posts that are assigned to that category detail some government official who is making everything worse via his actions. No, not every post gets assigned to that category, [...]

Men (and women) who physically abuse their spouses often express remorse afterwards. “Come Back Baby, I won’t hit you anymore” they say. And puzzlingly, their battered spouses often say yes, even though this latest offer is probably just as unlikely to be true as the previous 600 offers. To those of us observing such a [...]

Many Republicans, having discovered that Bush’s policies are tyrannical, are making noises about wanting out of the fascist state that they were cheering on a few months ago. While we may wonder why it took the trivial matter of having people who have the letter D appended to their names on news reports executing Bush’s [...]

The furor over the Tea Party movement has been quite exciting.  While I love watching government officials and their sycophantic propagandists energetically denounce people for daring to suggest that people should be permitted to keep their earnings,  I, like others, think the protests – in and of themselves – are insufficient to meaningfully change the [...]

Somali pirates have been in the news a great deal lately, and there is a great deal of controversy as to how to deal with them.  To date, the proposed solutions seem to be a simplistic calls for a) intervention to build a stable state in Somalia, b) send in various national navies to engage [...]

The trainwreck that is the Obama administration continues with his support for caps on executive pay. This bad idea has been tried before, and had the disastrous result of enhancing the power corporations wield over their employees, particularly with upper and middle management. It contributed to many of the instances of corporate malfeasance. The problem [...]

Would that we had an articulate defender of freedom in Congress as Daniel Hannan, Minister of the European Parliament for South East England. Here is a video of him confronting the Prime Minister of England. The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now [...]