This is as succinct, and as masterful a description of the relationship between the rights of man, and the government of a free state, as I have yet seen.
“I cannot, and will not, consent that the majority of any republican State may, in any way, rightfully restrict the humblest citizen of the United States in [...]

Ezra Klein quotes approvingly from Bruce Bartlett’s new book, The New American Economy: The Failure Of Reaganomics And A New Way Forward:
The reality is that even before spending exploded to deal with the economic crisis, the government was set to grow by about 50 percent of GDP over the next generation just to pay for [...]

There are few figures in the American libertarian movement that gave rise to as much controversy or passion as Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, it’s hard to find a libertarian who doesn’t have an opinion about the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. For many of us, she was the one who [...]

When Ludwig von Mises first arrived in the United States after escaping from Nazi Europe, and pretty much up until the present day, he was essentially ignored by the mainstream economics community in the United States. It was only through the assistance of American businessmen that he was able to get a job teaching at [...]

In the annals of Supreme Court history, there are perhaps only a handful of cases that go down in history as more egregious than what happened in Suzette Kelo v. City of New London. In that case, the Supreme Court approved an eminent domain taking by the City of New London, Connecticut that involved taking [...]

The people of Germany are celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the end of the division of their nation:
With prayers, music and pomp, Germany on Monday remembered the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall fell, sending East Germans flooding west and setting in motion events that soon led to the country’s reunification.
Chancellor Angela Merkel [...]

Well the good news is that the Democrats are saying they don’t have the votes. Probably one of the reasons why they don’t have the votes is because people are finding all about what’s in HR 3962.
They’re objecting to:

Higher taxes on individuals and businesses which will drive up unemployment
Government dictating what’s in their healthcare plan
Government [...]

Referring back to my post I wrote last week about the “perfect storm” the Obama Administration has created regarding medical marijuana, Colorado in many ways seems to be in the eye of this storm. It seems that more and more people are starting to understand the insanity of declaring war on a substance which has [...]

Part One in Reason.tv’s new series about Ayn Rand:

Few authors have ever achieved the popularity that the novelist and essayist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) did. With the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1958, Rand became a full-blown cultural phenomenon, selling millions of books and inspiring countless readers—ranging from former Federal Reserve [...]

On Wednesday evening, I was fortunate to attend a forum at The Cato Institute featuring the authors of two new biographies of Ayn Rand — Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne C. Heller, author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made.
It was a very [...]

This promises to be very interesting:

Coming November 2, Reason.tv will debut “Radicals for Capitalism: Celebrating the Enduring Power of Ayn Rand’s Ideas,” a new video series featuring segments on the novelist’s continuing presence in American culture and exlcusive interviews with Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Reason Foundation founder Robert W. Poole, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), and [...]

Uh-oh:
Last week the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that bong water is an illegal drug. Under state law, a controlled substance includes any “mixture” containing that substance, “regardless of purity.” The consequences of reading that definition literally can be severe. In the case before the court, a woman whose bong contained 37 grams of water with [...]

In January 2008 I wrote a post calling for the repeal of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. As I mentioned in the post, many thousands of lives are being sacrificed because of the moral hang-ups of certain individuals who think its icky to sell organs to people who need them. How dare they. [...]

Last week’s announcement from the Obama Administration that the Justice Department would call off the dogs with regard to medical marijuana in states where legal has created a perfect storm regarding state and local regulations. Colorado Attorney General lamented that with this announcement, a “legal vacuum” has been created and was quoted in [...]

Over at Findlaw, Cornell University Law Professor Michael Dorf criticizes the libertarian argument that a government requirement that every citizen purchase health insurance is unconstitutional:
A federal statute that was already in effect in 1994 provides that “all citizens shall have . . . an obligation to serve as jurors when summoned for that purpose.” To [...]

On Monday morning around 5:30 a.m. in Springfield, Virginia, Eric Williamson was making coffee (in the privacy of his own home) in the buff. Unbeknownst to Williamson, a woman and her 7 year old son could see him in all his glory as they took a shortcut through his front yard.
The woman, horrified that her [...]

My best friend of 29 of the 31 years I’ve been aboard this rock is a work-in-progress. I think he currently falls far too close to the “bleeding-heart-liberal” mindset, but he’s smart enough to eventually make the transition to “steely-eyed pragmatic libertarian”. He sent this along to me, and asked me to pass [...]

My old representative when I lived in Georgia, Tom Price, has offered competing health care legislation to the Democrats’ bills. I’m not a health-care wonk, so I’m not going to get into the meat of his proposal, but apparently one of the key points is limiting the employer-provided health insurance tax deduction and extending [...]

One of the issues left unresolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller was whether the Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment as an individual right applied to state and local governments. The last time the Court had the opportunity to rule on the issue, in 1886, in the case Presser [...]

Former Republican Senator Bill Frist starts out the U.S. News And World Report article in which he comes out in support of a government requirement that each American have health insurance with what can only be described as a fair degree of irony:
I believe in limited government and individual responsibility, cherish the freedom to choose, [...]