VIDEO: Tibor R. Machan - The Libertarian Credo


R.I.P March 18, 1939 - March 24, 2016

Tibor Machan, A Founding Editor Of Reason, RIP

by Nick Gillespie.     I'm sad to write that Tibor R. Machan, who along with Robert W. "Bob" Poole and Manny Klausner was one of the people who sustained and grew Reason magazine into the premier libertarian voice in public debates over politics, culture, and ideas, has died at the age of 77. We at Reason express our deepest condolences to his family  ... MORE

The Candidates' Public Disservice On Trade

by A. Barton Hinkle.   Almost three-fifths of Americans recognize that international trade offers the country an opportunity to expand the economy; only 34 percent see it as a threat. Unfortunately, the leading presidential contenders are doing their best to change that. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been spouting a  ... MORE

Little Sisters Of The Poor Case Not About Contraception, It's About Gov't Forcing You To Violate Your Conscience

by Stephanie Slade.   This morning the eight justices of Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Zubik v. Burwell. The case will determine whether the Little Sisters of the Poor and six other petitioners (including Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik) can object to an "accommodation" from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that they   ... MORE

VIDEO: Edward Snowden - Order Without Justice

Obama's Feckless Defense Of Human Rights In Cuba

by Nat Hentoff & Nick Hentoff.   On January 8, the Associated Press reported that President Barack Obama “may travel to Cuba as early as this spring if he feels the rights situation here is improving and a presidential trip will help.” The Castro dictatorship’s response was immediate and severe. According to Elizardo Sanchez, the president of the      ... MORE

John Stossel: The Art Of Trump

Hooray for Donald Trump!   I can ice skate in Central Park because Trump got the skating rink fixed after New York City couldn't. Couldn't, you ask? Really? How is that possible? New York City government couldn't fix an ice rink? Sad, but true. Despite six years of effort and fiddling with 13 million taxpayer dollars, government's bureaucracy was unable  ... MORE

VIDEO: The Truth Behind The Affordable Care Act

Rattled Students Demand Protection From Chalk Message

by Robby Soave. As anyone who has spent five seconds at a college can attest, sidewalks covered in chalk messages are a pretty common fixture of the campus scene. But Emory University students had their delicate worldview shaken by the sudden appearance of one specific chalk message, "Trump 2016," all over campus. The students were so ... MORE

IBDaily Editorial: Obama's False Equivalency

1776 wasn’t anything like Castro’s 1959 Putsch. In one of his last acts in Havana, President Obama threw out a false equivalency between the American Revolution and Cuba’s 1959 communist takeover. What are we to make of a U.S. president who embraces such hoary Marxist equivalencies? In his Tuesday address to the Cuban people,   ... MORE

Physicians Face Moral Dilemma In Drug War Conscription

by Jeffrey A. Singer.    Gov't wants the narco squad to be your doctor. America’s physicians have been conscripted as law enforcement agents in the never-ending War on Drugs, and it puts us in a moral dilemma. As media attention has turned to the recent national surge in prescription-opioid and heroin abuse, politicians feel compelled to be ready   ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Trade Deficit Angst

Donald Trump's primary bluster.   Let's look at the political angst over trade deficits. A trade deficit is when people in one country buy more from another country than the other country's people buy from them. There cannot be a trade deficit in a true economic sense. Let's examine this. I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me. That   ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Gender Confusion

John W. Whitehead: Fascism, American Style

They’re all fascists. “If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.” ― Henry A. Wallace, 33rd Vice President of the United States   This is an indictment of every politician who has ever sold us out for the sake of money  ... MORE

Jeremy Carl: The Insane Campaign Of John Kasich

Donald Trump's useful idiot.   The GOP primary is a battle between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. This has been fairly obvious since at least Super Tuesday, and it is overwhelmingly obvious today. The campaign of John Kasich is a joke, and not a particularly funny one, unless you like humor at the expense of the GOP and conservatism. Yet the      ... MORE

VIDEO: Ron Paul - The Forgotten Lessons Of Socialism

Jaana Woiceshyn: Making Moral Business Choices

On rational self-interest. Having recently concluded teaching an MBA business ethics course, I received unusual feedback from a student. He liked the course but told me that all of it should have been spent on covering the moral code of egoism—rational self-interest—because that is the code he liked the best and considered the most applicable    ... MORE

Andrew Napolitano: Hope For The Dead

The judge's Easter thoughts.     What is the connection between personal freedom and 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 editorials was not "safety" or "taxes" or "peace";   ... MORE

Bob Unruh: How Much Power Do Juries Really Have?

Answer: much more than they are told. A case against a Michigan man for handing out informational leaflets on jury nullification in front of a courthouse could impact what juries can do and how much control judges and prosecutors have of their decision-making process. “Freedom of speech is not absolute,” argued Brian E. Theide, who is        ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Black And White, Left And Right

A deeper look at politics and race.   Much is made of the fact that liberals and conservatives see racial issues differently, which they do. But these differences have too often been seen as simply those on the right being racist and those on the left not. You can cherry-pick the evidence to reach that conclusion. But you can also cherry-pick the evidence ... MORE

VIDEO: Rand Paul - The Folly Of Foreign Aid

The Nanny Always Wins: NY Daily Fantasy Sports Stop

by Scott Shackford. There was too much freedom going on. Thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of New Yorkers have been saved from the terrible possibility of enjoyment and/or failure (and winning or losing money) playing daily fantasy league sports. DraftKings and FanDuel have agreed today to immediately stop allowing New Yorkers to join  ... MORE

Betsy Woodruff: Ted Cruz And Donald Trump Want To Make America A Police State After Brussels

Fear-mongering for votes.   We didn’t even have a body count in Brussels before Ted Cruz and Donald Trump started calling for a police-state trial run in America. Within hours of the bombs there that left dozens dead and more wounded, the top two Republican presidential candidates here were duking it out to see who could pitch the most    ... MORE

Kenric Ward: EPA Putting Red Light on Amateur Car Racing

Because they can.    A "power grab" by the Environmental Protection Agency threatens to crash America's amateur car-racing industry without putting so much as a dent in climate change, warns the chairman of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee. The EPA's move to regulate emissions on non-road racing vehicles contradicted    ... MORE

VIDEO: Who Cares About Inequality?

Dominic Frisby: Why We Should Fear A Cashless World

Government monitoring can be complete.  The health food chain Tossed has just opened the UK’s first cashless cafe. It’s another step towards the death of cash. This is nothing new. Money is tech. The casting of coins made shells, whales’ teeth and other such primitive forms of money redundant. The printing press did the same for precious   ... MORE

Bob Russell: Free Market Should Determine Wages

Give low-skill workers a chance.     I think the Minimum Wage Law is one of the worst things that government has ever done. It’s often said that people can’t live on $7.25 per hour as a reason for increasing the minimum wage. Of course, we all wish that everyone could make more, but it is not up to us or even the government to say what people  ... MORE

Stephen Chapman: No Opiates For The Masses?

Drug war becomes war against pain relief.  There is no problem so bad that government-imposed remedies cannot make it worse, spawn new problems or both. A new confirmation of that phenomenon may be on the way, thanks to new recommendations from an agency intent on curbing the use of opiates. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease   ... MORE

Shining A Light On Police Seizures, Civil Forfeitures

by Nick Sibilla and Lauren Krisai.    How a town of 7,000 can build a $4.1 million dollar police station.  Mississippi has some of the strongest protections in the country for private property rights. But those protections are shockingly lax when it comes to a little-known police practice called “civil forfeiture.” Unlike criminal forfeiture,     ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Wussification Of America

The Real Tragedy Is That The Presidency Matters

by Jeffrey Tucker.     Freedom lovers everywhere are biting their nails this election season, wondering how the damage can be limited. Depending on who gains control, we could have trade wars, nationalized health care, the pillaging of Wall Street, more war in the Middle East, a VAT tax, direct surveillance of your smartphone, internment     ... MORE

Ilya Somin: Supreme Court Dismisses Nebraska-Oklahoma Lawsuit Against Marijuana Legalization In Colorado

Drug warriors take one on the chin.     The Supreme Court today refused to hear a case filed by the states of Nebraska and Oklahoma claiming that neighboring Colorado’s legalization of marijuana violates federal law and inflicts various harms on them: The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider a lawsuit from Nebraska and         ... MORE

VIDEO: America's Socialist Origins

Ed Butowsky: Calculating The True Cost Of Living

It's much higher than we're told/sold.   Over the past decade, we've been told that inflation has been tame -- actually below the target the Federal Reserve would like to see. But if that's true, then why does the average household find it harder and harder to get by? The ugly reality is that the true annual cost of living is far outpacing the       ... MORE

Anti-Party Law Turns Innocent Kids Into Criminals

by Steven Greenhut.   Orange County Republican Party Chairman Fred Whitaker got into GOP politics because of his “belief in individual liberty, limited government and a free market,” according to the party’s website. His recent actions as an Orange councilman, however, show too little regard for liberty, governmental limits or the Constitution’s     ... MORE

The Brute Force Of Government Spending On Autopilot

by Debra J. Saunders.   My car was towed from an area near a train station in San Francisco last month. I had parked in front of a small "No Parking" sign that I had not seen. I spent an hour looking for my car and calling an attendant who didn't answer the phone. When someone finally answered, she told me my car had been towed. It cost me $350.  ... MORE

Apple Engineers Say They’d Rather Quit Than Help FBI

by Maya Kosoff.   Individual liberty still valued in some quarters. The public battle between Apple and the federal government has taken a defiant new turn, as some Apple engineers say they would refuse to help the federal government break into their company’s devices. Engineers at the company have already talked about who would have to help   ... MORE

VIDEO: Steven Pinker - Free Speech, Reason & Knowledge

Kyle Peterson: The Great American Disconnect

Blue state, red state, now libertarian state? Fifteen years ago a Yale grad student named Jason Sorens began pondering what might seem like a wild question: How many libertarians would it take to commandeer a state government? At the time Mr. Sorens, then a 24-year-old campus libertarian, felt failed by electoral politics. The Libertarian Party  ... MORE

Sharon Cohen: Chicago's $662 Million Police Misconduct Bill

But few officers punished.   In this city's troubled history of police misconduct, Eric Caine's case may be unrivaled: It took more than 25 years and $10 million to resolve. For decades, he maintained he didn't brutally kill an elderly couple. The police, he said, beat him into a false confession. Locked up at age 20, he was freed at 46, bewildered by a world  ... MORE

VIDEO: Do Women Earn Less Than Men?

Steven Greenhut: How Regulators Quietly Drive Up Costs

Seen and unseen.    California political observers are understandably fixated on the goings-on in the state legislature, which is the living embodiment of what New York Judge Gideon Tucker wrote in an 1866 ruling: "No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session." Reporters and commentators also focus on major legal  ... MORE

Thanks To Minimum Wage Mandates, Carl’s Jr CEO Now Wants To Replace All Human Workers With Robots

Government forces low-skill workers to sidelines.  Looks like the little guy can teach a global fast food conglomerate a thing or two about running a restaurant. Eatsa, the mostly automated healthy, fast food bowl shop based in San Francisco, has inspired the CEO of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s to rethink the traditional workforce—by replacing all   ... MORE