This week, the State of Connecticut made progress in the right direction on the criminal justice front on two issues I care deeply about: the right of individuals to record the police in public and abolishing the death penalty. Earlier today, the Connecticut Senate passed a bill 42-11 that would hold the police liable for [...]

FreeMarketAmerica.org has released a great video (above) called “If I Wanted America to Fail.” It’s a pretty decent list of policies one would want to implement to cause America to fail but it’s far from complete. Here are a few suggestions of my own: If I wanted America to fail, I would want congress to [...]

Over at Reason, Mike Riggs responded to President Obama’s former Green Jobs czar Van Jones’ tirade about “so-called libertarians” at an Occupy rally in L.A. In case you missed it, Van Jones said that libertarians “say they love America but they hate the people, the brown folk, the gays, the lesbians, the people with piercings.” [...]

Sen. Arlen Specter was last Friday’s guest for The Jason Lewis Show to promote his new book. The interview started casually enough, discussing topics such as the Trayvon Martin case and various policies Sen. Specter supported while in the senate. Sen. Specter’s main complaint in his book, as he explained in the interview, was that [...]

Several members of the Colorado Senate introduced a bill yesterday that would reduce drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, favoring drug treatment programs over incarceration in state prisons. Lynn Bartels reporting for The Denver Post writes: Senate Bill 2012-163 deals with drug offenders who primarily are users and addicts rather than dealers, and [...]

The war drums for war with Iran on behalf of Israel are getting louder by the day. I wouldn’t have ever imagined that after experiencing the failure to find WMD in Iraq following the invasion along with the tremendous sacrifices of blood and treasure we would be having an almost identical conversation concerning Iran years [...]

Recently Chris has pointed out (here & here) the stupid/evil fallacy the left often uses* to paint the right. In short, the fallacy goes like this: 1) Republican policies are bad and designed purely to reward the current power structure. 2) If you are a Republican, you then must fall into one of two categories: [...]

One way we libertarians often describe ourselves are individuals who don’t want the government in our bedroom or our boardrooms. Those on the Left typically agree with the former while disagreeing with the latter while those on the Right typically believe the reverse. Yet when it comes to the federal government mandating that all health [...]

In last night’s debate, Gov. Mitt Romney said something quite incredible when asked if he would have signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA): Yes I would have [signed the NDAA] and I do believe it’s appropriate to have the capacity to detain people who are threats to this country who are members of Al [...]

Meet Democrat presidential candidate Vermin Supreme. The man wears a boot on his head, advocates a mandatory dental hygiene program, ponies for every American, and harnessing the energy of zombies to wean America off of foreign oil. Best of all, in his closing statement (following his singing!), Vermin tries to turn his political rival Randall [...]

Just yesterday, the Libertarian Party celebrated its 40th Anniversary. In that time, no LP presidential candidate has come close to winning and few have won any office higher than at the city or county level. As someone who would like America to return to a much freer and prosperous place, it’s very easy to become [...]

Here’s a follow up to a story I linked back in 2009 concerning the Institute for Justice’s legal challenge to the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 and the act’s applicability to bone marrow transplants. This is very good news for the roughly 3,000 Americans who die every year while waiting to find a bone [...]

Despite some valiant efforts of a handful of senators, the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2012 passed by an astonishing 93-7 vote. Earlier today, Sen. Dianne Feinstein offered yet another amendment to the bill that would have limited the military’s jurisdiction to detain suspects captured outside the U.S.; the amendment failed by a narrower [...]

Back in the 2010 mid-term election, Libertarian Party co-founder David Nolan ran as a Libertarian against Sen. John McCain for his seat in the U.S. Senate. Sadly, McCain easily won the election and Nolan died several weeks after the election and just two days before his 67th birthday. During his debate with Sen. McCain, Nolan [...]

Are you or someone you know a victim of what Glenn Greenwald calls “the drone mentality”? [Emphasis original] I was predictably deluged with responses justifying Obama’s drone attacks on the ground that they are necessary to kill The Terrorists. Reading the responses, I could clearly discern the mentality driving them: I have never heard of [...]

Part 1 Part 2 The challenge of creating an economically sound, simpler, and more just tax code, be it the existing code, 9-9-9, a flat tax, or a sales tax will remain an impossibility if tax revenues is the only focus of any reform. The problem that dwarfs any notion of how tax policy is [...]

Part 1 Is an economically sound, simpler, and more just tax code even possible? The truth of the matter is that there are too many people on the Left and the Right who do not want a simpler tax code that treats everyone equally. It’s probably not because the defenders of the existing system necessarily [...]

Here’s a very fascinating video taken at New York’s Zuccotti Park where Peter Schiff has a dialogue with some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Schiff brought a sign that read “I Am the 1% Let’s Talk,” and talk they did. One of the things that occurred to me watching this was how little true [...]

If there is one positive thing Herman Cain has contributed to the national debate it would be this renewed discussion about tax reform. While I am skeptical of some of the specifics of his 9-9-9 plan, if nothing else, Cain has forced the other candidates to come out with proposals of their own. Gov. Rick [...]

Last Friday marked the 10 year anniversary of the U.S. attack and subsequent nation building in Afghanistan. Most Americans, myself included, felt the attack on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan was a perfectly legitimate response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I doubt that most Americans would have supported a nation building mission creep [...]