Eric Peters: 'Your' Car Won't Be After 2015

After a certain point, it's not paranoia. The latest brick in the wall is the predictably named "Moving Ahead For Progress in the 21st Century Act," also known as Senate Bill 1813. (See here for the full text of the bill itself; the relevant section is 31406.) This legislation -- already passed by the Senate and likely to be passed by the House -- will impose a legal        ... MORE

John Stossel: The Assault On Food

Instinct tells us to fear poison.   If our ancestors were not cautious about what they put in their mouths, they would not have survived long enough to produce us. Unfortunately, a side effect of that cautious impulse is that whenever someone claims that some chemical — or food ingredient, like fat — is a menace, we are primed to believe it. That makes it   ... MORE

VIDEO: Milton Friedman - Stimulus and Inflation

Deroy Murdock: CAFE Standards Kill

In a crash, MPG is a small consolation. As Washington keeps yanking money from Americans’ wallets, car prices are set to rise beyond the reach of low-income drivers. And from there, things grow deadly. At fault is a regulatory regime called Corporate Average Fuel Economy, commonly called CAFE standards. Congress mandated these rules in 1975, during a   ... MORE

Glenn Greenwald: Obama Justice And Medical Marijuana

Crackdown justification must heard to be believed.   President Obama gave an interview to Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner this week and was asked about his administration’s aggressive crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries, including ones located in states where medical marijuana is legal and which are licensed by the state; this policy is directly    ... MORE

VIDEO: Using Regulation As Protection From Competition

Howard Rich: Son Of SOPA

Another clear and present danger to our liberty.    Having failed earlier this year to foist an Orwellian kill switch on Internet free speech, Congress is now peddling a kinder, gentler piece of “cybersecurity legislation.” However, Washington’s latest attempt to play Big Brother on the Internet poses an equally clear and present danger to our     ... MORE

Ronald Bailey: Can Censorship Stop Bioterrorism?

Open science is the best defense to flu attack.    In January, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) recommended that the journals Nature and Science restrict publication of controversial new research relevant to the transmission of avian flu between humans. The fear: Would-be bioterrorists may be combing the pages of  ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: Self-Defense Under Attack

A blind disregard for the evidence.   Critics of Florida's self-defense law object to its recognition of a right to "stand your ground" in public places, which eliminated the duty to retreat from an assailant. Yet many of these critics seem to believe they have a duty to stand their ground and never retreat, using George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon    ... MORE

Can Fully Informed Juries Help Cannabis Prohibition?

by Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director.    Of the many numerous peaceful and constitutionally-respectful means employed for decades by which cannabis law reformers have been to try to bring about about an end to Cannabis Prohibition laws, one of the most benign, yet most powerful arrows in the activist’s quiver is jury nullification–whereby   ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - The Mystery Of Happiness

RT: TSA Threatens Lockdown Over 4-Year-Old Girl

TSA's high security threat
Stick em up. There could be gun in that teddy bear.    The much-maligned Transport Security Authority (TSA) is once again in hot water after it accused an innocent four-year-old girl of attempted gun smuggling as she hugged her grandmother in the security zone. In a Facebook post that has since gone viral, Michelle Brademeyer describes the story of her    ... MORE

Robert VerBruggen: Making A Hash Of The 2nd Amendment

Ignoring the Founders on gun rights.  Harvard historian Jill Lepore has a piece attacking gun rights in the latest New Yorker, and a follow-up post on the magazine’s website. Most of it is basically what you’d expect: some numbers about gun violence, some horrifying anecdotes about people who’ve misused guns, some reporting from a gun range, some artsy ... MORE

VIDEO: Is Government's Problem Revenue or Spending?

Doug Bandow: A Two Pronged Attack On Liberty

The statist consensus of Democrats and Republicans. The race for the Republican Party presidential nomination is essentially over.  The GOP apparently has decided Mitt Romney is the answer. Unfortunately, that means the question must be pretty dumb. Not that Barack Obama is a better answer.  Both Romney and Obama are enthusiastic       ... MORE

Armstrong Williams: Government And Capitalism

False stimulation masks reality.   Are we not judged by God relative to our kindness to the downtrodden and the disadvantaged? Maybe. But since God created this planet and everything on it, including the laws of nature which dictate that the strong survive and the weak perish, why are models based on those laws so frequently disregarded? Can     ... MORE

Peter Ferrara: Stealing Our Elections

Why AG Holder and ACORN Obama hate Voter ID.  Columnist David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, asks in a recent column, "Can anyone think of an innocuous reason that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder oppose state voter ID laws?" The correct answer is definitely "No!" But even Limbaugh dances around the full answer to the ... MORE

Ronald Bailey: Building A 21st Century FDA

A better way to fast track new pills for old ills.   “FDA is relying on 20th century regulatory science to evaluate 21st century medical products,” declared Food and Drug Administration Commissioner (FDA) Margaret Hamburg back in October 2010. One result: As biotech and medical discoveries accelerate, the number of new drugs approved by the ... MORE

VIDEO: FOX NEWS - Death By Executive Order

Brian Sussman: Big Brother's Next Target: Your Car


The next step toward eco-tyranny. Many are quite concerned about Senate Bill 1813, a massive piece of legislation supposedly devoted to transportation issues.  Besides including a provision allowing the IRS the power to revoke passports belonging to those who are delinquent with tax debt in excess of $50,000, it appears that the potential law may be ... MORE

Benjamin Weiser: Jury Statute Not Violated Rules Judge

A victory for the cause of jury nullification.  The next time the 80-year-old retired chemistry professor takes his protest to the plaza outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan, he may make it home without being locked up. A federal judge on Thursday ordered the dismissal of an indictment against the professor, Julian P. Heicklen, who had been ... MORE

VIDEO: "If I Wanted America To Fail"

Alex Fitzpatrick: CISPA, A Monster That Refuses To Die

More like the Patriot Act than SOPA. The Cyber Intelligence Security and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, is headed to the House floor this week amid a flurry of amendments and controversy. When the bill first gained notoriety, it was compared to the much-hated Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. But there’s a key difference. While SOPA was labeled as a   ... MORE

Steve Huntley: Liberals Take Aim At Free Speech

The Constitution is under attack from the very people who claim to be fierce advocates of civil rights — liberals. Their goal is to restrict the very first amendment the Founders attached to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights — the one saying Congress “shall make no law” limiting freedom of press, speech and religion, and the rights of association and to petition ... MORE

Shikha Dalmia: Obama's Taxing Psychology

Obama needs the Gandhi Rule, not the Buffett Rule. President Obama has been on the stump condemning Senate Republicans for the defeat of the so-called Buffett Rule, his plan to make high-earning Americans pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. The naysayers, Obama thunders, chose “once again to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest ... MORE

Thomas Sowell - What Is 'Racist'?

Of race, lies and media.    Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case against George Zimmerman for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, what has happened already is enough to turn the stomach of anyone who believes in either truth or justice. An amazing proportion of the media has given us a painful demonstration of the thinking — and lack of thinking — that  ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - The Case For Insider Trading

Katie Kieffer: Amazon Is Obama's Mistress


President Obama has a mistress.    Her name is Amazon. Whereas former Presidents Kennedy and Clinton rendezvoused with female interns, Obama rendezvous with an e-commerce company. Amazon currently monopolizes e-book sales, controlling 60 percent of the market. And, like a jealous lover, Obama is suing Amazon’s competitors in order to    ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Devious Taxation

The dynamics of an uneven tax burden.  The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation does a yeoman's job of keeping track of how much we're paying in taxes and who's paying what. It turns out that American taxpayers worked this year from Jan. 1 to April 17, 107 days, to earn enough money to pay their federal, state and local tax bills. That statistic requires   ... MORE

VIDEO: Drug Lord Thanks Obama, Bush, & Reagan

Jacob Sullum: FIRE, Firefly, And The First Amendment

Fighting censorship on campus.   James Miller, a theater professor at the University of Wisconsin in Stout, is a fan of Firefly, Joss Whedon’s short-lived science fiction series. Evidently Lisa A. Walter, the school’s chief of police, is not. After Miller put a Firefly poster on his office door last September, Walter removed it, explaining in an email message that   ... MORE

Katie Pavlich: Free Market Makes America Great

Not government.    Sorry Occupy, the majority of Americans believe capitalism and a free market made this country great, not the government, despite President Obama recently crediting the government with American success. Obama cited a series of government "investments." Obama said that Republicans have "one message and that is, we're going to make sure ... MORE

Scott Lemieux: All The State's Spies

Will crony capitalists become government spies?     Congress is seriously considering a bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Intended to allow information sharing both between corporations and between corporations and the government, it presents serious dangers to individual privacy. The most important parts of ... MORE

Paul Stanley: Pelosi, Democrats Seek To Limit Free Speech

An assault on the First Amendment.   House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other congressional Democrats are throwing their support behind an effort to overturn a Supreme Court ruling despite warnings by critics that the effort would severely limit free speech. In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled in the case Citizens United ... MORE

VIDEO: Harry Browne - Defining Morality

Mike Riggs: 4 Industries Getting Rich Off The Drug War

Those who are profiting from "crime."   In a 2011 interview, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that legalization is “not likely to work” because “there is just too much money in it.” Clinton was talking about cartels, but the same holds true for the legal industries that owe their profit margins, market shares, and—in some cases—very existence to the war on drugs.     ... MORE

National Review: Free John Edwards

The questionable prosecution of John Edwards. John Edwards, the Dorian Gray of the Democratic party, is one of the most loathsome characters in American politics, corrupt himself and a source of corruption in others, a preening, moralizing fraud who went so far as to have a staffer claim paternity of the illegitimate child he fathered with a campaign contractor.    ... MORE

VIDEO: Who Was America's Greatest President?


Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard's answer WILL surprise you.

Doug Casey: Sociopathy Is Running The U.S.

When demise becomes "a mat ter of psychology."    I recently wrote an article that addresses the subject of sociopaths and how they insinuate themselves into society. Although the subject doesn't speak directly to what stock you should buy or sell to increase your wealth, I think it's critical to success in the markets. It goes a long way ... MORE

Ross Kaminsky: A Dark Day For Solar Power

An unaffordable feel-good luxury.  First Solar Corporation was indeed first at something: It was the first solar company to lose more than $15 billion of market value. FSLR's stock plummeted from $140 per share a year ago, and $170 a few weeks before that, to under $21 per share early this week before rebounding modestly on Tuesday. In fact $15 billion ... MORE