Sheldon Richman: Representative Government Is A Fiction

If we really live under a representative government, how can a president take the country to war in Syria without even a show vote in Congress?   "The success of government...," the late historian Edmund Morgan wrote, "requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor   ... MORE

In Iowa, Braiding Hair Risks Heavy Fines, Even Jail Time

by Nick Sibilla.   Achan Agit is no stranger to oppression. Born in what is now South Sudan, Achan was forced to flee her homeland in 2001 during the Second Sudanese Civil War. After living in Egypt as a refugee for three years (amid rampant xenophobia and racism), in 2004, she came to the United States and became a lawful permanent resident.   ... MORE

VIDEO: Andrew Napolitano - The Presumption Of Innocence

John Stossel: Beat The Elite

An exaggerated sense of self-importance.    We love to complain about elites, people who seem to have a special advantage, privileges in life. I get annoyed by the Kardashians and other spoiled rich kids. They didn't work for their wealth. They don't contribute. Still, those elites are mostly harmless. But there's one group of truly dangerous    ... MORE

Benjamin A. Rogge: The Case for Economic Freedom

The free market is about self-determination.     I shall identify my brand of economics as that of economic freedom, and I shall define economic freedom as that set of economic arrangements that would exist in a society in which the government’s only function would be to prevent one man from using force or fraud against another — including   ... MORE

VIDEO: Spider In The Urinal

Houston's LGBT Bathroom Losers Vow To By-Pass The People And Go Straight To Bureaucrats And Administrators

by Kelsey Harkness.    An end run around democracy.The people who matter are policy-makers who have the ability to change the regulations which make life difficult for transgender people on a day to day basis. Bureaucrats, administrators, judges, HR benefits, directors, school superintendents, police chiefs: these are the kinds of people   ... MORE

Mike Bird: This Is How A Central Bank Could Kill Off Cash And Bring In Negative Interest Rates On Your Savings

A bank may not be the best place for your money.   Since the financial crisis, the world's understanding of economics has been undergoing a lot of rapid change. Ideas that would have been considered crazy just a decade ago are now seen as much more likely. One of those ideas is that central banks could bring in negative interest rates. ... MORE

John W Whitehead: The Real Issues You Won't Hear From The 2016 Presidential Candidates This Election Year

The tyranny behind the curtain.   We now have less than one year until the 2016 presidential election.  Despite the dire state of our nation, however, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible way by the presidential candidates—certainly not if doing so might      ... MORE

Daren Bakst and Katie Tubb: Lawmakers Need To Kill EPA’s And Army Corps’ Water Rule: Property Rights Are At Stake

Regulators gone wild.     Congress appears to be stepping up to the plate to kill the Environmental Protection Agency’s and Army Corps of Engineers’ water rule (known as the “waters of the United States” or WOTUS rule). Lawmakers just need to bring it home by sending legislation to the president. In doing so, Congress will be protecting       ... MORE

VIDEO: Government Like A Jealous Boyfriend

Flawed Ohio Marijuana Legalization Initiative Defeated

by Ilya Somin.   An anti-marijuana or anti-monopoly vote? Ohio Issue 3 – the seriously flawed marijuana legalization referendum initiative that I nonetheless defended because of its superiority to the status quo, has gone down to defeat. While not all of the votes have yet been counted, it is likely that it will lose by a large margin (currently 65-35,       ... MORE

Barry Farber: Hillary Clinton Is A Comfortable Liar

Some lies are defensible, others not-so-much.   He was furious, a radio listener calling in rage because I’d said that lying was sometimes permissible in government. I may even have said a president who refuses ever to lie should be impeached. That’s not my favorite argument, but I don’t shirk from it. Imagine a president confronted with a         ... MORE

VIDEO: 3 Supreme Court Cases To Watch

Which Of The 11 American Nations Do You Live In?

by Reid Wilson.     Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social  ... MORE

Robert Coolman: CDC Says E-Cigs Help You Quit Smoking

A helpful tool to quit traditional cigarettes.   According to a CDC report issued Saturday, electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) are strongly associated with attempts to quit regular smoking. E-cigs are battery-powered inhalation devices that typically deliver nicotine and/or flavored vapor in the form of an aerosol. Several studies have suggested a ... MORE

IRS Possessed Stingray Cellphone Surveillance Gear - Why?

by Nicky Woolf and William Green.     13th federal agency to use secretive dragnet!  The Internal Revenue Service is the latest in a growing list of US federal agencies known to have possessed the sophisticated cellphone dragnet equipment known as Stingray, according to documents obtained by the Guardian. Invoices obtained following a request  ... MORE

Evan Schuman: Turn That Old Phone Into A Privacy Device

New way to safeguard calls.   Most forms of communication used by enterprises these days are highly prone to being intercepted, whether by law enforcement, cyberthieves, corporate spies, or wayward employees and contractors. That leaves enterprise IT open to new approaches to safeguard communications. I just saw one creative idea on the   ... MORE

VIDEO: Rand Paul - Tyranny Of Bureaucrats

Thomas Sowell: Ignoring The Obvious

To know and not to do is not to know. A recent, widely publicized incident in which a policeman was called to a school classroom to deal with a disruptive student has provoked all sorts of comments on whether the policeman used "excessive force." What has received far less attention, though it is a far larger question, with more sweeping      ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Destroying Your Vote

Election integrity is not racist.   Voter ID laws have been challenged because liberal Democrats deem them racist. I guess that's because they see blacks as being incapable of acquiring some kind of government-issued identification. Interesting enough is the fact that I've never heard of a challenge to other ID requirements as racist, such as those:    ... MORE

VIDEO: Do-Gooders And Special Interests

Pew Research: Homicide Rates Have Been Cut In Half Over The Past 20 Years (While New Gun Ownership Soared)

"An armed society is a polite society" - R A Heinlein. The Pew Research Center reported last week that the murder rate was cut nearly in half from 7 per 100,000 in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2013. Over the same period, overall gun deaths (including accidents and suicides) have fallen by one-third from 15.2 to 10.6 per 100,000. In spite of this, Pew   ... MORE

A. Barton Hinkle: The Parties Turn It Up To 11

GOP moving rightward, while Dems move leftward.  "Look, I imagine that there's theoretically a chance that [we] all went from being radical extremist crazies to Washington sellouts in 12 hours," South Carolina Republican Rep. Mick Mulvaney said the other day. "But maybe a more likely narrative is that we really think that this is a good  ... MORE

South Park Shows How To Defeat Social-Justice Warriors

by Stephen L. Miller.      A soul-crushing society, led by a click-happy media and finger-wagging president, that has demanded our country and culture change everything from its football-team names to its campus speech policies, has gone largely unchecked for the past seven or so years. Today, the shirt a scientist wears is more important than his     ... MORE

Prescribing Patients The Drugs They Want Is Not Murder

by Jacob Sullum.     Last Friday a California jury convicted Hsiu-Ying Tseng, a Rowland Heights physician, of second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of three patients who overdosed on drugs she prescribed. Local prosecutors say this is the first time a doctor has been convicted of murder in the United States based on allegations of  ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Protected Out Of Work

George Will: Supreme Court Picks Will Be Critical

Slowing the rate of tyranny.     A supremely important presidential issue is being generally neglected because Democrats have nothing interesting to say about it and Republicans differ among themselves about it. Four Supreme Court justices are into the fourth quarters of their potential centuries — Stephen Breyer (77), Antonin Scalia (79),   ... MORE

U.N. Unveils New Scheme To Rip Off America

by Leo Hohmann. An international redistribution of wealth plan. At the upcoming United Nations Climate Summit in Paris, participating nations have prepared a treaty that would create an “International Tribunal of Climate Justice” giving Third World countries the power to haul the U.S. into a global court with enforcement powers. Congress would be  ... MORE

VIDEO: Successful Liberals Live By Conservative Values

After Budget Deal, A Sense Of Futility Grows In Congress

by Nick Timiraos.   Cowards kicking the can. Congress ended an 11th-hour showdown when the Senate passed a bill Friday that raises the debt ceiling for the last time during Barack Obama’s presidency. Many policy makers wish it could be the last such standoff in a long-running drama over the nation’s borrowing limit. The brinkmanship has grown so    ... MORE

A Prosecutor's Guide To Not Prosecuting A Killer Cop

'Public servants' protect each other. Lt. Mark Tiller did not violate the law when he fired two shots into a moving vehicle in July, killing Zachary Hammond as the unarmed 19-year-old attempted to flee, a state prosecutor announced Tuesday. Tiller, a Seneca, South Carolina, officer, has maintained that he fired his gun because he feared for his  ... MORE

Eminent Domain: A Million Homes Taken Since Kelo

by Mark A. Calabria, CATO.    It has been just over a decade since the Supreme Court decided in Kelo v. New London that local governments can take private property by eminent domain under a very broad reading of “public use”.  Cato held an event earlier this year to examine the legal impact of Kelo, featuring remarks from George Mason Law     ... MORE

What If Hillary Clinton Is Too Big To Jail?

by Anita Kumar and Greg Gordon.  Hillary Clinton appears to have overcome an investigation of her role in the 2012 deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, but she still faces a months-long FBI inquiry into the handling of sensitive information while she was secretary of state. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, which opened its review       ... MORE

VIDEO: John W Whitehead - Tyranny In America

How To Steal $75,000 From The Poor In One Day’s Work

by Jeffrey A. Tucker. A tax-collecting scheme disguised as justice. The new liberality concerning marijuana possession in the United States is long overdue, but let’s not exaggerate how much progress we’ve made. Users might not be ending up in jail as frequently as they did 10 years ago. But cops, judges, and courts still exercise arbitrary power to ruin    ... MORE

Charles P. Pierce: The Senate's New 'Give The NSA All Your Private Information' Bill Would Make George Orwell Blush

Scare tactics push big government agenda forward.     While nobody was watching, the Senate a couple of days ago passed something called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), which passed at least partly because if you say "Cyber warfare, boogedy-boogedy!" around nervous legislators these days, they'll pass a bill agreeing to  ... MORE

VIDEO: How One Group Of Tyrants Banned Gun Sales

How Climate Change Activism Harms Third World Countries

by Shikha Dalmia.   To avert a tragedy, they'll cause one. You wouldn't know it from the happy spin emanating from the Oval Office, but a Third World revolt in Bonn, Germany, this week almost derailed the Paris climate change negotiations in November. Although peace has been restored for now, it only happened by papering over this       ... MORE

Boehner Hands Ryan A Defeat On The Way Out The Door

by David Harsanyi.    Grass-roots conservatives have many unrealistic expectations and political objectives. And then sometimes they have a good point. The new budget deal arranged by John Boehner and Democrats— approving $50 billion of additional spending in 2016 and $30 billion in 2017—will be split between domestic discretionary    ... MORE