by Don Watkins. A few years ago, I was in need of some extra cash so I decided to sell my laptop on eBay. A few days later, I got an offer. It wasn’t great, but then neither was my laptop. But before the payment went through, I got a call from the government. “We have decided that the offer you got was too low. We’re not going to let you sell your ... MORE
ObamaCare Gets Juicy As Employees Recognize Cost
The heavy cost of government health care. Yesterday, some person (or group) tweeted to me a link to a campaign (allegedly) by and for the current and former employees of Juicy Couture to demand “just hours.” You see, according to the campaign, the hip and trendy Juicy is doing what other companies are doing in an effort to cope ... MORE
Expect These 8 Steps From The Government's Playbook
by Simon Black. To anyone paying attention, reality is now painfully obvious. These bankrupt, insolvent governments have just about run out of fingers to plug the dikes. And history shows that, once this happens, governments fall back on a very limited playbook: 1. Direct confiscation - As Cyprus showed us, bankrupt governments are quite happy to ... MORE
Matt Taylor: Legalization Movement Plots Its Next 4 Years
Yes, we cannabis. Last November, with voters in Colorado and Washington state leading the way, ballot initiatives legalizing, taxing, and regulating recreational marijuana use passed for the first time ever. In Colorado, legalization actually outperformed President Obama. An Oregon effort would almost certainly have prevailed, too, if ... MORE
Gun Control Efforts Persist But Public Support Dims
Polls find fewer favor gun rights restrictions. Vice President Joseph R. Biden, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
and other gun control advocates insisted Wednesday that both momentum
and public opinion are on their side, but recent polling shows Americans
turning against stricter laws as more time elapses since the Newtown ... MORE
Labels:
government,
gun control,
individual liberty,
politicians,
politics,
poll,
regulation,
restrictions
Andrew Napolitano: Hope For The Dead
Without freedom, we are nothing. What does freedom have to do with rising from the dead? When America was in its infancy and struggling to find a culture and frustrated at governance from Great Britain, the word most frequently uttered in speeches and pamphlets and letters was not safety or taxes or peace; it was freedom. ... MORE
The Manufactured Authority Of The Nanny State
A core American concept, corrupted and ignored. Lately, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been the chief spokesman touting the merits and necessity of a Utopian nanny state. In a moment of honesty, he said while making a recent appearance on NBC, "I do think there certain times when we should infringe on your freedom." ... MORE
Jacob Sullum: Proactive Policing Becomes Harassment
NYPD's stop-and-frisk program is unconstitutional. The first time David Floyd was stopped and frisked, on a Friday afternoon in April 2007, he was walking down Beach Avenue a few doors from his house in the Bronx when two police officers confronted him, demanding to know who he was, where he was going, what he was doing, and ... MORE
Supreme Court Limits Drug-Sniffing Dog Use
Cops deprived of one warrantless search capability. The use of a drug-sniffing dog by police outside of a home where they suspected drugs were being grown constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court said in a decision handed down Tuesday. The case, Florida v. Jardines, dealt with whether ... MORE
Forbes Op-Ed: Feinstein Shoots-Off Mouth, Hits Foot
Gun control misses the mark. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) engaged in a shoot-out over the constitutionality of her proposed Senate bill to ban “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines. Although it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line 10-8 vote, it has virtually no chance of passing the ... MORE
Rand Paul And Ted Cruz Threaten Filibuster On Guns
by Jonathan Allen. Sens. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are threatening to filibuster gun-control legislation, according to a letter they plan to hand-deliver to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office on Tuesday. “We will oppose the motion to proceed to any legislation that will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions,” ... MORE
John Stossel: Imperial Washington
Where public servants go to become masters. The Senate did something this past weekend it hasn't done in four years: passed a budget. The law requires the Senate to pass a budget, but Congress often ignores its own laws. For most of Barack Obama's presidency, a series of continuing resolutions kept the money — your money ... MORE
Walter E Williams: Are We Equal?
Are women equal to men? Are Jews equal to gentiles? Are blacks equal to Italians, Irish, Polish and other white people? The answer is probably a big fat no, and the pretense or assumption that we are equal — or should be equal — is foolhardy and creates mischief. Let's look at it. Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Female ... MORE
Thomas Sowell: 'Me Too' Republicans
RINOs running in a herd. Many ideas presented as "new" are just rehashes of old ideas that have been tried before — and have failed before. So it is no surprise that the recent "Growth and Opportunity Project" report to the Republican National Committee is a classic example of what previous generations called "Me too" ... MORE
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Democrats,
election,
individualism,
integrity,
minorities,
politicians,
principles,
Republican
Tim Brown: Ignorance & Mismanagement At DHS
Fast and Furious report is revealing. As Homeland Secretary Janet “Big Sis” Napolitano faces mounting pressure to answer for DHS’ large solicitations and purchases of ammunition over the past year, the second of two reports looking at who is to blame in the gunrunning scheme known as Operation Fast and Furious is painting DHS ... MORE
Minimum Wage Hike Means Fewer Jobs Can Be Available
Economics 101: Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts says the minimum wage should be $22 an hour. As is always the case, the urge to help will create more problems than it alleviates. The usual response to such nonsense is that if government can make lives better by establishing a minimum wage of $X per hour, then why not ... MORE
Soaring Social Security Disability Rolls Headed For Collapse
Build it and they will come. America's unemployment rate has come down significantly from its peak of 10 percent in late 2009. That may seem to suggest a steady improvement in the employment picture, but the impression is misleading. We recently pointed out that workers age 25 to 54 are experiencing a jobs depression that has gotten ... MORE
Thomas Sowell - Can It Happen Here?
Legalized theft in America is more subtle. The decision of the government in Cyprus to simply take money out of people's bank accounts there sent shock waves around the world. People far removed from that small island nation had to wonder: "Can this happen here?" The economic repercussions of having people feel that their money is not safe ... MORE
Mark Thornton: Nullify The War On Drugs
The marriage of two liberty concepts. Public opinion now favors the outright legalization of marijuana with nearly three-out-of-four adults in favor of legalizing medical marijuana.
These numbers should continue to grow, because the polls exhibit a type
of “generation effect,” in that people are not changing their minds as
they ... MORE
Labels:
crime,
drug war,
government,
individual liberty,
jury nullification,
marijuana,
poll,
prohibition
Paul Brown: The Semantics Of Gun Control
Same weapons can be for assault or defense. Since the SenateJudiciary Committee passed Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s “assault weapons” ban March 14, a fitting question might be, what is an “assault weapon”? A term that originated in the 1980s, it was popularized after the original “assault weapons” ban in 1994. “Assault weapon” is now ls that would be more accurately described as “defense weapons.” ... MORE
Brady Dennis: FDA To Roll Out New Cigar Regulations
Government continues to reduce the people's options. Nearly four years after it began regulating cigarettes, the Food and
Drug Administration is poised to extend its reach to a broader range of
tobacco products. At the top of that list: cigars, which have
experienced a boom in recent years even as cigarette sales have
declined, in part ... MORE
Labels:
bureaucracy,
FDA,
freedom,
government,
nanny state,
regulation,
restrictions,
smoking,
tobacco
26 Big Gov Republicans Vote For Internet Sales Tax
by Daniel Horowitz. Early Saturday morning, the Senate adopted its first concurrent budget
resolution in four years. Democrats cleverly made sure to hand out
enough hall passes to vulnerable red state senators so they could vote
against the $1 trillion tax increase, while ensuring that it ultimately passed 50-49.
Senators Baucus, Begich, Hagan, and ... MORE
Obama's Tyranny: Petty Or Something More Sinister
by Matt Holzmann. Last week, headlines informed us that, because of the Sequester, the FAA will be reducing the number of Air Traffic Controllers and closing 149 control towers completely. Earlier, the Department of Homeland Security released hundreds of illegal aliens awaiting deportation because they could not afford to hold them ... MORE
Current Laws May Offer Little Shield Against Drones
So much for limits on search and seizure. Targeted killings have made drones controversial, but a new class of tiny aircraft in the United States — cheap, able and ubiquitous — could engage in targeted snooping that existing laws are inadequate to address, witnesses and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said in a hearing on ... MORE
Kyle Becker: The Power Motive And The Profit Motive
Which one should you trust? The most common misconception in America's warped political culture is that modern liberals tend to be altruistic and compassionate, while conservatives are self-centered, greedy old misers. On the contrary, not only are many modern liberals driven by a personal profit motive via the aegis of government, but they are ... MORE
Eric Holder: If The President Does It, It's Legal
by John W. Whitehead, Rutherford Institute. “I never thought I would see the day when a Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture and that acts that are merely cruel, inhuman and degrading are consistent with United States law and policy, that the Supreme Court would have ... MORE
VIDEO: Involuntary Servitude By Subpoena
From Murray Rothbard's For A New Liberty.
Labels:
coercion,
crime,
jury,
justice,
labor,
lawyers,
libertarian,
military draft,
punishment,
subpoena
ObamaCare Forces Companies To Think About Lay Offs
by Julie Weed, NY Times. The company is one of thousands of small businesses that employ more than 50 full-time employees and thus will be required to offer health insurance to their workers — or pay into a government fund — beginning Jan. 1. Rachel Shein and Steve Pilarski, the married owners of the bakery, which employs 95 people, ... MORE
Labels:
health care,
insurance,
medical,
ObamaCare,
red tape,
regulation,
restrictions,
unemployment
Rich Trzupek: Obsessive-Compulsive Environmentalism
Focused on the next big scare. America’s massive and well-funded environmental industry is always in need of new worlds to conquer, or at least to attack with broom and dustpan. But the irony behind the modern-day environmental movement in America is that the more successful the movement is, the more petty subsequent goals necessarily ... MORE
Politicians Prefer Scare Tactics To Sensible Reform
by Steven Greenhut. Not many of my friends or neighbors are sitting on pins and needles, worrying that the world as we know it will end as the federal government “slashes” spending as part of the automatic sequester cuts mandated by a previous budget bill. And not many people have been thinking, “Geesh, there’s nothing we need more than ... MORE
Labels:
California,
government,
high speed rail,
politicians,
sequestration,
spending,
stimulus,
tax
Feds Begin Lowering Expectations On ObamaCare
from the Washington Examiner editorials. A month before the final passage of his health care law, President Obama convened a summit the Blair House. During the staged event, which was aimed at resurrecting the bill, he touted the legislation's insurance exchanges. Obama said, "[I]f you join one of these exchanges, you will have choice and you'll ... MORE
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