John Stossel: 2015

Terrorism! Crime! Deadly storms! Hillary Clinton! We reporters focus on bad news, but at year's end, let's remember what went right. 2015 was a better time to be alive than most any prior point in history. The rich got richer. Some people think that's a problem, but why? Do rich people sit on their piles of money and cackle about how rich   ... MORE

What The War On Smoking Tells Us About The Drug War

by Danielle Allen.   It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In January 1964, the Beatles first broke onto the Billboard chart with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; by June, Ringo Starr had collapsed from tonsillitis and pharyngitis. In January , the surgeon general announced that scientists had found conclusive evidence linking smoking to  ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Pickpocketing Taxpayers

Protection For Cops Who Kill Unarmed Civilians

"We don't second guess police officers."   A grand jury's decision not to indict an officer who killed a 12-year-old holding a toy gun sheds light on a criminal-justice system that gives fairly broad deference to police officers' version of events. As Business Insider's Natasha Bertrand reported, the prosecutor in the case of the 12-year-old said,     ... MORE

Glenn Greenwald: Those Demanding Free Speech Limits To Fight ISIS Pose A Greater Threat To United States Than ISIS

Because the essence of America is freedom.       In 2006 – years before ISIS replaced Al Qaeda as the New and Unprecedentedly Evil Villain – Newt Gingrich gave a speech in New Hampshire in which, as he put it afterward, he “called for a serious debate about the First Amendment and how terrorists are abusing our rights – using them as they once  ... MORE

VIDEO: Bad Kids Or Bad System?

TSA Will Stop Accepting Driver's Licenses From 9 States

by Nick Gillespie.    The last time we took notice of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), it was to inform you that the unpopular, expensive, and ineffectual outfit had decided it could force travelers on domestic airline flights to go through full-body scanners. Previously, TSA had allowed folks to submit instead to a full-body pat-down.     ... MORE

DOJ Suspends Asset Forfeiture Equitable Sharing

by Mikayla Hellwich.    Police currently take more of citizens’ assets than thieves do. The Department of Justice released a memorandum addressed to local, state, and tribal law enforcement agencies Monday to announce that the equitable sharing program for asset forfeiture funds has been temporarily suspended due to financial considerations.    ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Remembering 2015

The lessons we should have learned.      How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it? It is always hard to know when a turning point has been reached, and usually it is long afterwards before we recognize it. However, if 2015 has been a turning point, it may well have marked a turn in a downward direction for America and for       ... MORE

John W. Whitehead: What’s In Store For Freedom In 2016?

You might want to sit down for this.       As I illustrate in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we in the emerging American police state find ourselves reliving the same set of circumstances over and over again: egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying,        ... MORE

VIDEO: Penn Jillette - Freedom Is Freedom

John McAfee Enters Libertarian Party Presidential Race

Anti-virus pioneer throws his hat in the ring.  John McAfee is the 70-year-old founder of the antivirus software firm that bears his name (though he has not been actively involved with it since 1994, and the company was bought by Intel in 2010). He's also a colorful world adventurer who has been candid about his extreme exploits in   ... MORE

Lu Wang: 2015 - The Year Nothing Worked

Stocks, bonds, cash go nowhere.     Worst year for asset allocation funds since 1937. The idea behind asset allocation is simple: when one market struggles, it’s OK because an investor can jump into another that is thriving. Not so in 2015. In fact, if you judge the past year by which U.S. investment class generated the largest return, a case can be    ... MORE

VIDEO: Does Fear Cost Us Our Liberty?

Micah J Fleck: New York’s “Misgendering” Law Is Wrong

Another slap at free speech.     The Republic just published a very informative report on a new civil rights guideline that could end up with NYC citizens facing hefty fines for what is being called “misgendering.” The idea, as the original news story explains, is that calling a trans person the wrong pronoun or title is now seen as a civil rights violation. ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: The Puzzling Persistence Of Pee Tests

A favorite tactic of control freaks.   Slate columnist Daniel Engber, who was recently "shocked" to discover that workplace drug testing is still a thing, wonders: What's up with that? He finds, as I did back in 2002, that there's little evidence drug testing is a sound investment for employers: As was the case 30 years ago, testing has no solid base of evidence,  ... MORE

Steven Greenhut: Regulation A Sure Bet For Fantasy Games

California's option destroyers never sleep.   "Fantasy sports" has come a long way from the office football pool. Instead of passing around photocopied spreadsheets and collecting a few bucks from cubicle mates, players now go to sophisticated web sites, where they can make daily wagers—and not just trudge through a long sports season    ... MORE

Was 2015 A Bad Year For Campus Free Speech?

by Robby Soave.  Are easily-offended students and their allies within the university bureaucracy ushering in a new era of censorship on American college campuses? Even President Obama is worried that excessive political correctness is stifling legitimate debate at universities. Still, it’s hard to say whether the situation on campuses is truly    ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Threats To Liberty

Michael Thomsen: Legalizing Weed Isn’t Enough

Permit marijuana use in public.    Recreational marijuana use has been legal in Seattle since 2012, but I still felt like I was getting away with something when I walked into a dispensary there this fall. There was a bouncer waiting behind a roped-off entryway on the otherwise quiet Capitol Hill side street. He passed my driver’s license through a  ... MORE

Our Presidents Are Beginning To Act Like Kings

by Charles C. W. Cooke.        If the passage of time were a reliable guarantor of increasing human freedom, we would expect history to look a little different than it does. In school, we would have learned that the Englishmen of Charles I’s reign were better off than their Elizabethan grandparents; that the colonists implicated by the Declaratory   ... MORE

VIDEO: Radical Islam - The Most Dangerous Ideology

Justin Gardner: A Federal Judge Just Shamed The DEA For Fabricating Sham Cases Trying To Justify War On Drugs

Entrapment, law enforcement's favorite tool.  Since the War on Drugs began in earnest under Nixon and Reagan, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has ruined millions of lives for nonviolent, victimless behavior. The DEA’s drug crusade is not limited to the homeland either, as it also has sole responsibility for pursing international  ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Misleading And Using Blacks

Sacrificing blacks in the name of diversity.       Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ran headlong into the leftist meat grinder by questioning whether college admission of blacks with academic achievement levels significantly lower than the rest of the student body is beneficial to blacks. His question came up during oral arguments   ... MORE

David Harsanyi: Admit It. You Just Want Your Own Dictator

Leaders are unsavory, dangerous, and unAmerican.     This incessant clamoring by voters and punditry for better "leaders" and more "leadership" is one of the most unsavory, dangerous and un-American tendencies in political discourse. When Donald Trump was asked last week by Joe Scarborough what he made of an endorsement from       ... MORE

Mike Reid: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Charity

Economic principles can save your life.    His gaze flicked over my backpack. “You have to put that in the back,” he said. “I don’t know if you have a knife in there.” If I knew then what I know now, I would never have gotten into that blue Pontiac. By that time, I’d hitchhiked thousands of miles with hundreds of different drivers, and they were almost   ... MORE

VIDEO: Ayn Rand - How To Rule Mankind

Mandatory Minimums Don't Prevent Crime

by Kristie Eshelman.        You would think that the threat of longer sentences should reduce the amount of crimes being committed. After all, it’s a basic law of behavior that people respond to incentives, so harsher punishments should serve as a deterrent to potential criminals. Unfortunately, decades of experience have taught us that this     ... MORE

Walter Block: Why You Should Want Blackmail To Be Legal

Blackmail would diminish real crime.  At first glance it is not hard to answer the question, "Is blackmail really illegitimate?" The only problem it would seem to pose is, "Why is it being asked at all?" Do not blackmailers, well, blackmail people? And what could be worse? Blackmailers prey on people's dark, hidden secrets. They      ... MORE

VIDEO: Why Donald Trump Is A Gift To Democracy

DOJ Suspends Abusive Asset Forfeiture Program – For Now

by Ilya Somin.     On Monday, the Justice Department suspended its abusive “equitable sharing” asset forfeiture program, which incentivizes state and local governments to seize the property of criminal suspects – including many who have never even been charged with any crime, much less convicted. The program enables state law enforcement     ... MORE

Veronique de Rugy: The Government Wasted Tons Of Money On 'Shrimp Fight Club' And A Million Other Things

Waste, fraud, abuse, and monkeys on hamster wheels.  In honor of the release of the new Star Wars movie, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), subtitled this year's "Wastebook" as "The Farce Awakens." The latest edition of this annual report details 100 spending programs—totaling $108.5 million—that are a complete waste of your money.    ... MORE

What If Jesus Had Been Born In The American Police State?

by John W. Whitehead.    The Christmas narrative of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one. The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, ... MORE

Obama’s Top Ten Constitutional Violations Of 2015

by Ilya Shapiro.     As we approach the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, there isn’t much that the president can do to change people’s opinion of him, for better or worse. His legacy, barring some extraordinary occurrence — including an extraterrestrial one, as the holiday advertising blitz for the new Independence Day movie reminds us — is     ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - The Politics of Income

TSA Makes It Harder For Passengers To Avoid 'Virtual Strip Search' Scanners Just In Time For The Christmas Rush

by Wills Robinson.     Air travelers will find it harder to avoid body scanners after airport security protocols were quietly ramped up. The six million Americans who are expected to take to the skies over Christmas could face delays after the Transport Security Administration (TSA) tweaked guidelines so passengers will have to go through the    ... MORE

John Stossel: Politicians Without Borders

Today's politicians seem to have few limits.     When driving on treacherous roads, guardrails are useful. If you fall asleep or maybe you're just a bad driver, guardrails may prevent you from going off a cliff. Recently, The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel used the phrase "no political guardrails" to point out how many of today's    ... MORE

VIDEO: The Real Threat To Free Speech Is Cowardice

Brent Bozell: The Worst Reporting And Punditry Of 2015

You decide which camp is more obnoxious.    If we're counting press clips, in politics the year 2015 was dominated by Donald Trump. The liberal press is emotionally conflicted on this one. Some are delighted with the notion that he's going to destroy the Republican brand with oafish overstatements. Some are disgusted that he's still in the race     ... MORE

Stats Show Hillary’s Policies Cause Terrorism, Not Trump's

by Lee Stranahan.     While Hillary Clinton claimed that ISIS is using Donald Trump to recruit members, reality shows that worldwide terrorism skyrocketed due to the policies of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her boss, President Barack Obama. A November 2014 piece in the New York Times—well before Donald Trump entered the race for   ... MORE

California Has Plenty Of Water — And Too Much Politics

by Steven Greenhut. Almost everyone knows California is running out of water as it enters the fourth year of a grueling drought. The results are stark, as massive reservoirs turn into mud pits, and state inspectors fine residents for watering their lawns. But in the state's second most populous county, there's a problem of a different sort. The San Diego   ... MORE

Public Safety's Greatest Threat: The American Police State

by Matthew Harwood.       If you’ve been listening to various police agencies and their supporters, then you know what the future holds: anarchy is coming—and it’s all the fault of activists.  In May, a Wall Street Journal op-ed warned of a “new nationwide crime wave” thanks to “intense agitation against American police departments” over   ... MORE

VIDEO: Glenn Greenwald - Drug Policy In Portugal

Thomas Sowell: The Busybody Left

Self-appointed minders of YOUR business.   The political left has been trying to run other people's lives for centuries. So we should not be surprised to see the Obama administration now trying to force neighborhoods across America to have the mix of people the government wants them to have. There are not enough poor people living in  ... MORE

Jeff Nesbit: We Have Lost The War On Drugs

Criminalizing drugs just destroys more people.     It's time, finally, to face the ugly truth. We've lost the war on drugs in America. We need a new playbook, now, before more lives are lost. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that fatal drug overdoses in America were the highest in recorded history in 2014. The news   ... MORE

VIDEO: Edgar The Exploiter

Video Of Long Beach Killing By Police Of Suspect Released; Officer Shot His Partner, Then Both Cops Shot The Suspect

by Brian Doherty. So what was the crime for which Noel Aguilar had been apprehended?   Riding a bike wearing headphones.   Petty law enforcement claims another life. When Noel Aguilar was shot and killed by two officers in Long Beach, California, in May 2014, the police initially reported that Aguilar had shot Officer Albert Murad before     ... MORE

Janet Yellen Fights The Tide Of Falling Interest

by Keith Weiner.     On Wednesday Dec 16, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen announced that the Fed was raising the federal funds rate by 25 basis points. Let’s get one thing out of the way. This is not a move towards free markets. Whether the Fed sets interest lower, or whether it sets interest higher, we still have central planning. We still have price ... MORE

The Democrats’ Theme For 2016 Is Totalitarianism

by Kevin D. Williamson.  At the beginning of December, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether Charles and David Koch, two libertarian political activists, should be considered — his remarkable words — “an enemy of the state.” He posed the same question about Exxon, and John Kerry, who could have been    ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: Want My Blood? Get a Warrant.

Balking at warrantless alcohol testing.  Danny Birchfield drove his car into a ditch. Steve Beylund "nearly hit a stop sign while making a right hand turn into a driveway." William Bernard got his truck stuck in the river while trying to extract his boat. In his underwear. These embarrassing incidents—the first two of which happened in North Dakota,    ... MORE