The Need For Semi-Automatic "Assault" Weapons

By Katie Pavlich.    By now, we’ve heard the argument about semi- automatic "assault" rifles: nobody needs one. We’ve heard the only reason why someone would obtain this kind of weapon is so they can kill people, which is far from the truth. We’ve also heard the argument from both the Left and the Right that a pistol is how someone protects their    ... MORE

Government Unable To Define 'Homeland Security'

David Kravets on government's blank check for tyranny.  What is “homeland security?” The federal bureaucracy doesn’t know, and that’s problematic for a government that has been fighting the ill-defined “war on terror” following 9/11, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service. In short, “homeland security” is whatever the    ... MORE

VIDEO: Murray Rothbard - Pornography

Nit Ghei: Higher Wages, Lower Employment

Misguided government makes matters worse.     New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday laid out a wide-ranging agenda for the year. The first-term Democrat wants gun control, casinos and higher pay for teachers. Perhaps his most economically perilous proposal is an insistence on raising the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $8.75.  ... MORE

Top 10 Most Dangerous U.S. Government Agencies

The danger within.      We have chosen to highlight United States agencies; however, this top 10 list has global impact, as the U.S. has now proven to be the enforcement division of the overarching globalist agenda of centralized control. One could argue that every government agency serves the purpose of stifling freedom and wasting      ... MORE

VIDEO: Piers Morgan's Anti-gun Argument Destroyed

John Stossel: Government Handouts Foster Dependency

Section 8 recipients become comfortably dependent.    The Obama administration now proposes to spend millions more on handouts, despite ample evidence of their perverse effects. Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, says, “The single most important thing HUD does is provide rental       ... MORE

A. Barton Hinkle: The EPA Pushes The Envelope, Again

An institutional culture that sees the law as an impediment. In accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of trying to regulate “water itself as a pollutant,” Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is not showing an excess of exactitude. But his looseness is rhetorical and harmless. The EPA’s is neither. Last week federal judge        ... MORE

Andrew Napolitano: Guns And Freedom

Who is it that seeks to take freedom by force?  The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. And yet, the        ... MORE

M. Housel: 3 Economic Misconceptions That Need To Die

Regarding goods from China and Middle East oil. At a conference in Philadelphia last October, a Wharton professor noted that one of the country's biggest economic problems is a tsunami of misinformation. You can't have a rational debate when facts are so easily supplanted by overreaching statements, broad generalizations, and          ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - No Regulation? No Problem

Tom McClusky: Fiscal Cliff Deal Penalizes Married Couples

Politicians vote incentive against marriage. When the “marriage penalty” first appeared in the tax code in 1969, most families had only one member working, and the tax provision was designed to give a tax cut to one-income families. Unfortunately, the tax failed to envision the growing number of women in the workforce. Today in most families,      ... MORE

Ronald Bailey: The Promised Land Of Fracking

Environmental and economic benefits outweigh the costs. Matt Damon’s new film Promised Land is stoking the controversy over fracking, the shorthand for natural gas production using hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. The film pits a big natural gas production company against economically stressed farmers in a Pennsylvania ... MORE

VIDEO: Why Is the U.S. Prison Population So Large?


The war on drugs is a war on us. 

3 Troubling Ways TSA Punishes Passengers Who Opt Out

Intimidation, harassment and retaliatory wait time.   If you don't want to walk through a poorly tested full-body scanner or have a TSA agent belittle your anatomy before your next flight, then you still have the right to opt out and submit to an "enhanced" pat-down. That's exactly what I did on a recent trip from Orlando to Atlanta.   ... MORE

Barry Farber: American Exceptionalism? Off The Charts!

Why hide from the facts?  More than half of the American population believes the best days of this country are behind us. That might be depressing if America’s best days were less than they truly were. As it stands, it’s about as depressing as Bill Gates crying “Poverty!” if his fortune were to dip from 100 billion dollars down to around, say   ... MORE

Sally Pipes: ObamaCare Guarantees Higher Premiums

Health insurance to go up $3,000 + higher. President Obama will deliver a second inaugural address later this month. He’ll no doubt reflect on what he’s done during his first four years in office — and on his signature healthcare law in particular. Let’s reflect with him. During his first campaign for the presidency in 2008, the president promised ... MORE

Richard Fausset: Mexico Considers Legalizing Pot

Bolstered by U.S. ballot wins. Forgive the Mexicans for trying to get this straight: So now the United States, which has spent decades battling Mexican marijuana, is on a legalization bender? The same United States that long viewed cannabis as a menace, funding crop-poisoning programs, tearing up auto bodies at the border, and deploying sniffer dogs,       ... MORE

VIDEO: Milton Friedman - Abolish The Fed

Amy Payne: Uproar Over Bloated Sandy Aid Package

Bloated governor decries selfishness.   Leaders from New Jersey and New York blew up yesterday after House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) postponed a vote on an aid package related to Hurricane Sandy. But the bill is so loaded with pork projects that these officials should consider directing their anger at the Obama Administration, which is    ... MORE

Ira Stoll: Obama's Crony Capitalism

Granting favor to the few. On the Friday before Christmas, President Obama announced that he was appointing Mohamed A. El-Erian, the CEO of Pacific Investment Management Company, as the chairman of his Global Development Council. The announcement didn’t get much attention, but it should. It exemplifies what’s wrong with Obama’s approach to   ... MORE

VIDEO: The Indispensable Milton Friedman

Thomas Sowell - The Role Of 'Educators'

Indoctrination skills on parade.  Many years ago, as a young man, I read a very interesting book about the rise of the Communists to power in China. In the last chapter, the author tried to explain why and how this had happened. Among the factors he cited were the country's educators. That struck me as odd, and not very plausible, at the time.       ... MORE

Ralph R. Reiland: The Cliffs Of 1984

“Slavery Is Freedom” and “Tax Hikes Are Tax Relief.”  So we didn’t go over the fiscal cliff and instead got a deal that delivers no cuts in government spending, raises taxes on “the rich” (the definition of which consistently changes), expands the size and role of government, keeps the red ink flowing at record levels, and provides       ... MORE

Washington Times: EPA's Chilling Effect

Alaskan liberty goes up in smoke under new air regs.     Not-so-unintended consequences of overregulation are in the air. Newly adopted rules limiting airborne soot imposed by bureaucrats in Washington threaten to freeze the choices — and toes — of individuals living more than 4,000 miles away in subarctic Alaska.        ... MORE

Yael Ossowski: How Walt Disney Cashes In On Welfare

Why are taxpayers picking up the tab for Mickey Mouse? Since his first appearance in the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willy, there has been no greater American ambassador than Mickey Mouse, the cartoon character who sparked the launch of the media empire of the Walt Disney Co. Generations of children and adults worldwide have grown     ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Greed Vs Charity

Katie Kieffer: Five Good Men

There are a few good men.   And, by "a few," I mean five. Certainly there are far more than five good men in America. But in the U.S. Senate, there are just five moral Republicans. Who am I referring to? Let me introduce you to the five men in the Senate who stood their ground while their Republican peers (save two abstainers) voted for a fiscal cliff  ... MORE

Damon's Anti-Fracking Movie Financed By Oil-Rich Arabs

Lachlan Markay on an inconvenient truth.    A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas producers as money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural American towns. It is therefore of particular note that it is financed in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The creators of Promised    ... MORE

VIDEO: The Truth About Fracking

Obama Supporters Shocked, Angry At New Tax Increases

by Joseph Curl.    Sometimes, watching a Democrat learn something is wonderful, like seeing the family dog finally sit and stay at your command. With President Obama back in office and his life-saving “fiscal cliff” bill jammed through Congress, the new year has brought a surprising turn of events for his sycophantic supporters.         ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Dishonest Educators

Test-taking frauds.    Nearly two years ago, U.S. News & World Report came out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal." It reported that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history." More than three-quarters of the  ... MORE

Americans Are The Most Spied On People In History

Big Brother is in the building.    TechDirt notes: In a radio interview, Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin (who’s been one of the best at covering the surveillance state in the US) made a simple observation that puts much of this into context: the US surveillance regime has more data on the average American than the Stasi ever did on East Germans. ... MORE

Eric Frankson: Sobriety Checkpoints Violate Our Rights

The gutting of the Fourth Amendment.    Until 1990, sobriety checkpoints were illegal in California and the United States. But a Supreme Court decision overturned 200 years of protection from illegal search-and-seizure. The Supreme Court case Michigan Department of State Police vs. Sitz changed how we party and how we view the police.     ... MORE

VIDEO: Is America Primarily About Self Interest?


Walter E Williams.

Gene Healy: The Five Worst Op-Eds of 2012

The New York Times comes on strong.  For three years running, I've closed the Old Year with a seasonal burst of bile, my annual Five Worst Op-Eds column. As before, this year's malicious listicle rewards bad arguments and bad writing, with extra points for warped values. 5. Eric Posner, "The World Doesn't Love the First Amendment,"    ... MORE

Baylen Linnekin: Labeling Law Will Hurt American Pizza

Congress needs to order a slice of wisdom.   This week, as a new Congress was being sworn in, the Food and Drug Administration released two sets of controversial and long-delayed food-safety rules. Another FDA rule that’s been long in the making is the agency’s proposed menu-labeling rule. The purpose of that rule, first proposed in 2010 as  ... MORE

VIDEO: Let's Give Up on the Constitution?!

Stop Talking About Freedom And Start Protecting It

Lawmakers pay lip service to liberty while trampling it.   This year’s Rose Parade in Pasadena, California featured the Department of Defense’s “Freedom Isn’t Free” float. While nothing is close to free when DOD is involved—the B-2 bomber that made a fly-by as parade-goers cheered cost more than twice its weight in gold—the rose-      ... MORE

Mark J. Perry: The Truth About Those 'Big Oil Subsidies'

A lesson in political double-talk.    Do a Google search for the term “subsidies for oil companies” and you’ll get more than 600,000 results.  Try a search for “subsidies for Big Oil” and you’ll get almost 700,000 results.  The term “tax breaks for Big Oil” has almost half a million results. Then do a Google search for “tax breaks for green energy” and you’ll only   ... MORE