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 [...]

The United States is a banana republic. The Jeffersonian ideal of a series of republics built upon enlightenment values of freedom and reason has died. It wasn’t a sudden death, like that which occurs in a car crash; where one can pinpoint to the second where death occurred. Rather it was a slow lingering death, [...]

Barack Obama is making the same disastrous mistake that George Bush did, and I am amazed that neither he nor his advisers are aware of it. Many people have commented that Obama has effectively given Pelosi and Reid free rein to insert as much prok as they wish into their spending bills while pontificating in [...]

Václav Klaus gave a speech that U.S. politicians would do well to listen to: The citizens of the Czech Republic feel that the European integration has an important and needed mission and task. It can be summarized in the following way: – removing unnecessary – and for human freedom and prosperity counterproductive – barriers to [...]

The Obama administration, having retained the basic elements of Bush’s disastrous n ational security policies, and having applied a similar political approach to the economy, has set the stage for the collapse of the U.S. The number of laws that tangle us all continues to multiply. At this point it is probably impossible for us [...]

Over at Reason, Radley Balko has published a damning article and video of Dr Michael West attempting to murder a man named Jimmie Duncan. In 1993,  [Dr Michael West and Dr Steven Hayne]  conducted an examination on a 23-month-old girl named Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe, Louisiana, who had drowned in her bathtub. The video [...]

College enrollment has been booming. Schools have not only been adding new seats to existing programs but also adding new programs. And, unlike the free-market process where the supply of a good is expanding dramatically, the price of these seats has been increasing dramatically – much faster than the CPI. The increased attendance at increased [...]

One of the bizarre fallacies propounded by President Obama, the Congressional leadership, and their intellectual enablers such as Paul Krugman, is the notion that society should be organized to give people jobs, and that if the supply of jobs is insufficient to meet the demand, the government should step in and create an additional supply [...]

John Hasnas of Georgetown University wrote What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian: …almost no one ever discusses what it feels like to be a libertarian. How does it actually feel to be someone who holds the principles described in Murray’s book? I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with [...]

The first bill that Obama signed into law is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.  The bill is designed to plug “holes” in the Civil Rights Act, Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the American’s with Disabilities Act, namely in the requirement that people sue within 180 days of the unlawful discrimination occurring. [...]

A dictator is a monarch who is both law-maker and law enforcer, who also acts as final judicial arbiter in cases, and is not legally liable for his actions. By such a standard, George Bush was a dictator.  He claimed the power to ignore the legislature, and to arbitrarily rewrite the law – citing the [...]

Many people have expressed a hope that Barack Obama will be an improvement over George Bush and that he will roll back some of George Bush’s excesses.  They see in Obama a man who understands nuanced argument, who at least acknowledges that those who oppose his policies can have good reasons and arguments for doing [...]

Few topics seem to trigger strong emotions like the question of immigration.  The body of classical liberal and libertarian philosophy is full of people who espouse laissez-faire positions on the movements of goods and investment across borders, then completely reverse this position when it comes to the free movement of people.  Much of the opposition [...]

Money is critical to civilization. Without it, the capital improvements and complex economic processes are impossible, and there will be a very weak form division of labor. Money allows humanity to rise above the savagery of stone age existence. Yet most people don’t understand what money is, how it is created and how it can [...]

Many progressives are looking forward to increased government oversight over the auto industry. They see this as a chance to influence the types of vehicles that are produced and to dictate that production be turned to socially beneficial uses, including the manufacture of green cars that auto manufacturers are not manufacturing. These vehicles are not [...]

Dear Senator Kerry, I was aghast to read your response to my email on the subject of requiring people to get Federal government approval to work.  It is the sort of totalitarian policy I would expect from some right wing fascist dictatorship. I am especially stunned see a former nominee of the Democrat party send [...]

One aspect common to totalitarian regimes is the forced loyalty oath. Nazi Germany, for example, forced all pastors, civil servants and soldiers to take an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. In the Soviet Union, in Communist China, and numerous other nations, the state demanded that people swear loyalty to the government as a condition [...]

In IEEE‘s flagship magazine, Spectrum, there is a fairly idiotic editorial warning Europeans against buying natural gas from Russia. Why can’t the European Union just adopt a strategy of energy independence and wean itself from Russia and the “stans”? Of course, there is no way for Europe to be “independent” with respect to natural gas. [...]