Like most people who value individual liberty, I listened to President Obama’s speech about reducing gun violence with a great deal of trepidation. He presented several ideas such as limiting the size of magazines to 10 rounds, banning “military-style assault weapons” (i.e. any gun that looks scary to progressives who know almost nothing about firearms), [...]

With the start of college football barely over 24 hours away, those of us who are rabid fans are salivating for some action… And for many of us, that pavlovian response to college football has us salivating for a tasty adult beverage as well. What better way to show our support than by drinking our [...]

For decades the cost of medical care has risen relative to prices in general and relative to people’s incomes. Today [1994] a semi-private hospital room typically costs $1,000 to $1,500 per day, exclusive of all medical procedures, such as X-rays, surgery, or even a visit by one’s physician. Basic room charges of $500 per day [...]

Typical… It takes years of schooling and a series of hard exams to become a doctor or a lawyer, but just about anyone, with enough tenacity, can become responsible for billions of dollars. Pretty much anyone can call themselves an economist and opine about fiscal policy. Perhaps even more troubling, there exists no uniform set [...]

Remember the “good old days” of the Brady Bill and the instant background check? It turns out that the gun grabbers in the 111th Congress no longer believe these gun control measures go far enough. Introducing perhaps the gravest threat to date against the Second Amendment: H.R. 45 Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of [...]

Recently I had an interesting conversation with someone who leveled the following accusation: “You libertarians don’t care if people die from lack of medicine, or if someone can’t afford a doctor.  Libertarianism is the freedom to die from a cold while the doctor who could treat you is doing a checkup for a rich guy [...]

Over in the Science Based Medicine blog, Wallace Sampson is expresses outrage that the National Institutes of Health has announced an initiative to fund “research” into Traditional Chinese Medicine …

While insightful, Dr Sampson fails to dig down to the real sources of the problem:

If the NIH wastes money on quackery, its officers do not suffer a loss. They don’t have to justify their spending to donors or shareholders. The money extracted at gunpoint from the citizenry will continue to flow in regardless of the junk science the NIH produces.

Airlines, a business regulated to death, when they’re not self-immolating due to mismanagement, face a lot of pressures and not a lot of answers. Like other businesses which are procured as a commodity (i.e. most travelers fly whatever airline is cheapest on Orbitz, Travelocity, etc), there is constant pricing pressure and cutthroat competition, and always [...]

Very quietly, a bill has been working its way through Congress that bans Genetic Discrimination. The bill, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, has been passed by the House of Representatives with overwhelming support and will probably pass the Senate in the next few weeks. While this bill has some powerful arguments behind it, it is [...]

Let me ask, does this remind anyone of a marijuana tax stamp? A ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone who does not pay for a government smoking permit has been proposed by Health England, a ministerial advisory board. The idea is the brainchild of the board’s chairman, Julian Le Grand, who is a [...]

Kurt Havelock, 35, planned to shoot people at the Super Bowl.  He loaded up his car with an AR-15 rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition, then drove to a parking lot near the stadium.  When he got there, however, he was suddenly hit with remorse, realized that what he was doing was wrong and decided [...]