March 13, 2020

Senators push sneaky anti-privacy bill

fromReason: The EARN IT is an attack on encryption masquerading as a blow against underage porn. 

Government is Watching Every Move You Make

To avoid charges of price gouging, eBay bans sale of coronavirus supplies

fromReason: Attempts to impose low prices on emergency supplies often do far more harm than good. High prices bring essential items to where they are needed most.

Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

Walter E Williams: Rights versus wishes

fromCreators: Sen. Bernie Sanders said: "I believe that health care is a right of all people." He's not alone in that contention. That claim comes from Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives. 

Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

Bernie Sanders is all but done

fromPolitico: It wasn’t just the results on Tuesday. It was the realization that, for the first time, he had no excuse and nothing better to look forward to. 

Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

Why you can't solve a public health problem with economic stimulus

fromReason: Is a new stimulus package the right response to a pandemic?   

Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

Coronavirus vs. the mass surveillance state: which poses the greater threat?

fromRutherfordInstitute: Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expands its powers. 

Government is Watching Every Move You Make

January 15, 2020

Atlanta police make monumental move, disband entire drug unit to focus on actual crime

fromFreeThoughtProject: “Violent crime and gang activity must be the Department’s primary focus and where we will have a greater impact on the crimes affecting those most often victimized in our communities.”

Individual Liberty: America's First Principle                   The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

John Stossel: Occupational licensing hurts the little guy

fromReason: People who want to work should be allowed to work.

Regulation Nation

Elderly, wheelchair-bound woman alleges TSA agents groped her body in full view of other travelers

fromFreeThoughtProject: TSA employees reportedly ordered a 95-year-old leukemia patient in a wheelchair to remove her adult diaper so that agents could search her.

Police State America          Government is Watching Every Move You Make

VIDEO: Ayn Rand - Entitlements Cannot Be Rights

fromLibertyPen/YouTube: A brilliant explanation of rights and entitlements and the inherent difference in the two.

Individual Liberty: America's First Principle 

Walter E Williams: Unappreciated crime costs

fromCreators: Criminal activity imposes huge costs on black residents in low-income neighborhoods of cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia and many others.

The Government is Not Us

Nullify government tyranny: In 2020, harness the power of your discontent

fromDailyBell: Twenty years into the 21st century, and what do we have to show for it? Government corruption, tyranny and abuse have propelled us at warp speed towards a full-blown police state.

Police State America                      The Government is Not Us

Feb 13, 2019

Rights and non-rights: a simple way to distinguish the two

fromFEE:  It’s readily apparent today that Americans are of widely different views on what a right is, how many we have, where rights come from, or why we have any in the first place.

Individual Liberty: America's First Principle 

Some Washington sheriffs refuse to enforce new gun laws

fromABCNews:  Sheriffs in a dozen Washington counties say they won't enforce the state's sweeping new restrictions on semi-automatic rifles until the courts decide whether they are constitutional.
2nd Amendment Assaults

Police can seize cash in the mail. An innocent man found out the hard way.

fromGreenvilleNews:  Not since the days of the Sheriff of Nottingham have cops so openly practiced state-sponsored theft.

Police State America

Senator files '420' marijuana bill to legalize it federally

fromForbes:  The proposal would remove it from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), impose more taxes on sales and create a system of permits for businesses to engage in cannabis commerce.

The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

Study: voter ID laws don’t stop people voting

fromFreeBeacon:  Strict voter ID laws do not suppress turnout, a new paper finds, regardless of sex, race, Hispanic identity, or party affiliation.

Political Correctness and Other Nitwittery

Abuse of Force: Body camera video shows man tased 11 times by officers in Arizona

fromKSHBKansasCity:  Multiple independent law enforcement experts, who agreed to review the incident, said the officers’ conduct was unlawful, potentially criminal.

Police State America

Feb 11, 2019

The real reason 4 cops got shot in Houston last week

fromDailyBell:  When you look deeper at the case, you realize these cops didn’t get shot because of anti-police rhetoric. They got shot because they invaded an innocent couple’s home without announcing themselves.

Police State America   

Green new deal—same old progressive policies

fromReason:  Using climate change to justify government-guaranteed jobs, health care, and housing.

Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

Jackboots in the morning: No one Is spared from this American nightmare

fromRutherfordInstitute:  Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now— rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides it wants.

Police State America

Bezos protests invasion of his privacy, as Amazon builds sprawling surveillance state for everyone else

fromTheIntercept:  If the surveillance powers of the NSA, FBI or other agencies were used to obtain incriminating information about Bezos due to their view of him as a political enemy ...

Government is Watching Every Move You Make

New York police killed her son, then refused to answer her questions. The law they’re hiding behind.

fromReason:  An obscure provision designed to protect personnel records makes it nearly impossible to hold the state’s cops accountable.

Police State America      Justice is a Result, Not Just a Process

The libertarian case for a border wall

from71Republic:  Though the wall would require a small amount of force, its long-term savings in government spending shows a principled and pragmatic necessity.

The Welfare State: Promoting Dependency

Dec 19, 2018

A crisis in the making: Know your rights or you will lose them

fromTheRutherfordInstitute: We are approaching critical mass, the point at which all hell breaks loose. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

Why Banks will shut you down for nothing that is actually Illegal

fromArmstongEconomics: The government fines banks if its customers are caught doing wrong incentivizing the process of ditching customers who use cash instead of conveniently trackable credit cards.

Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

73% of top U.S. universities do not guarantee the presumption of innocence in sexual misconduct trials

fromReason: The long-held judicial concept known as the presumption of innocence is now hopelessly out-of-style. At college campuses, it must take a back seat to #MeToo feelgoodism. 

Political Correctness and Other Nitwittery    Justice is a Result, Not Just a Process

Report: 9 in 10 colleges restrict free speech

fromWatchDog.Org: Ninety percent of public and private higher education institutions in the U.S. restrict the speech of their faculty and students, according to a new report produced by FIRE.

Indoctrination and Censorship

Democracy Is a threat to individual liberty

from71Republic: Democracy is flawed when it comes to protecting the rights of the individual, but is successful in restricting those rights.

Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

Mueller destroyed messages from Peter Strzok's iPhone; OIG recovers 19,000 new "FBI lovebird" texts

fromZeroHedge: Nothing to see here! After Strzok was kicked off the special counsel investigation, Mueller's Records Officer scrubbed Strzok's iPhone after determining "it contained no substantive text messages." 

Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

May 3, 2016

Tariffs are self-imposed sanctions

fromReason: We restrict trade to punish our enemies. Why would we do the same to ourselves?
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

Are restrictions on opioids a threat to human rights?

fromWashingtonPost: When government imposes regulations that make it near impossible for a physician to prescribe an essential medication, or for a pharmacist to stock the medication, that becomes a human rights issue..
Regulation Nation     The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange      Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

Walter E Williams: Colleges: anti-diversity and pro-exclusion

fromCreators: It is a cowardly act for a professor to take advantage of student immaturity by indoctrinating pupils with his opinions before the students have developed the maturity and skill to examine other opinions.
Indoctrination and Censorship

Feinstein finally catches up with her voters, abandons her opposition to marijuana legalization

fromReason: A tired old drug warrior checks into rehab.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

In Venezuela, inflation quadruples to 18,000 percent in two months, with no end in sight

fromMiamiHerald: Venezuela's inflation rate spiked from 4,966 percent to nearly 18,000 percent in just March and April — a trend that, if it continues, could push the country's annual rate to more than 100,000 percent.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

CNN hosts porn star's lawyer Michael Avenatti 59 times in less than two months

fromNewsbusters: The newest incarnation of CNN's anti-Trump fetish.
Media Bias on Parade

March 30, 2016

How Trump's steel tariffs harm America

fromReason: The American people will suffer more than the moguls in the steel industry will benefit. 
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

Privileged whites leave inner-city minorities defenseless with gun control push

fromPBNews: Gun control has always been about disarming the common man. The ruling class and their wealthy donors will always be armed to the teeth. 
Police State America      2nd Amendment Assaults

Why you should NEVER talk to police

fromLewRockwell: Should be required reading ESPECIALLY for honest, law abiding citizens with nothing to fear from law enforcement. Think about how tight-lipped they get when they are the ones accused!
Police State America     Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

California, other states sue over citizenship question on next census

fromSFGate: Leftwing tyrants panic at the prospect of illegal aliens not providing them with political power. 
Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

Socialist utopia: child gangs fight for "quality garbage" with machetes in Venezuela

fromZeroHedge: The Miami Herald has detailed the lives of children forced to live under the harsh realities of socialism. 
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

Detroit taxpayers cough up $225,000 to pay for unjustified dog killings by cops

fromTheNewYorker: Some cops have killed more than 70 dogs. 
Police State America

January 20, 2018

The undoing of limited government

fromTheWashingtonTimes: The elites in the federal government and the deep state — the parts of the government that are unauthorized by the Constitution and that operate in the dark, what candidate Trump called “the swamp” — have formed a consensus that marches the might of the government toward total Orwellian surveillance.
The Government is Not Us      Government is Watching Every Move You Make    Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

Silence is betrayal: Get up, stand up, speak up for your rights

fromTheRuthrfordInstitute: Enough with the deafening silence in the face of outright corruption, base immorality, denigrating language, demoralizing greed, abject cruelty, derision, cynicism, violence, oppression and tyranny.
The Government is Not Us 

Stop warrantless snooping on Americans

fromCreators: Over the course of two hours last Thursday morning, Donald Trump offered two diametrically opposed takes on a surveillance bill making its way through Congress. Both were wrong.   
Government is Watching Every Move You Make 

The originalist case for jury nullification

fromReason: Is there a place in our system for a jury to acquit because the jurors believe the underlying law is unconstitutional?
Justice is a Result, Not Just a Process

House bill seeks to end war on marijuana, spark recovery instead

fromForbes: Recovery from our generations-long war on cannabis must include a range of efforts at the federal level, from adjusting the role and responsibility of law enforcement to reinvesting in communities.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

John Stossel: Selling Hate

fromCreators: The Southern Poverty Law Center is now a hate group itself. It's a money-grabbing slander machine.
Political Correctness and Other Nitwittery

January 12, 2018

Congress plotting to cut a hole in the 4th Amendment, again

fromCreators: Judge Andrew Napolitano asks whatever happened to the public promise to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution as it is written?

Government is Watching Every Move You Make

Justice denied: The government Is not going to save us

fromRutherfordInstitute: A 26-year-old man was gunned down by police who banged on the wrong door , failed to identify themselves and then repeatedly shot and killed the innocent homeowner who answered the door while holding a gun in self-defense, but the justices of the high court refused to intervene to address police misconduct.

Justice is a Result, Not Just a Process

Twitter engineers to “ban a way of talking” to censor opposing political opinions

fromProjectVeritas: Former Twitter software engineer Abhinav Vadrevu on shadow banning: “they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it”.

Indoctrination and Censorship

John Stossel: Punish poor people

fromCreators: When health totalitarians make suggestions, leftist politicians jump.
Regulation Nation

VIDEO: Don't Talk to Cops

fromYouTube: In praise of the 5th Amendment right not to be a witness against yourself.

Individual Liberty: America's First Principle     Police State America

Federal legalization of pot would generate 1 million jobs & raise $130 billion

fromTheFreeThoughtProject: In addition to putting dent in failed 'War on Drugs,' legalization could put hundreds of thousands of people to work and generate billions in revenue.

The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

October 27, 2017

When it comes to surveillance, watch the watchmen

from NY Times: The relationship between security and liberty is often described as a balancing act. This act can’t take place if we’re not informed about the technology used to safeguard our security.
Government is Watching Every Move You Make

Hashd al-Sha’abi commander calls for US forces withdrawal from Iraq

from PressTV: "To the US secretary of state, your military forces must prepare now to get out of our homeland Iraq immediately and without delay once the ISIS elimination excuse is over."
Defense Versus The War Machine

Health care is not a right

from Capitalism Magazine: If your mere desire for something, anything, imposes a duty on other people to satisfy you, then they have no choice in their lives, no say in what they do, they have no liberty, they cannot pursue their happiness.
The Pursuit of Happiness

Major study shows legal weed reversed a decade of rising opioid deaths in Colorado

from FreeThoughtProject: The end of cannabis prohibition is paying many dividends for society.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

Identitarianism and the Splintering of Democracy

from Quillette: This very good piece looks at how identity politics plays out in a representative democracy.
Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

Sessions continues to push 'gateway drug' myth about marijuana

from Reason: "Much of the addiction starts with marijuana." Jeff Sessions attempts to peddle 20th century propaganda long after the train has left the station.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

September 15, 2017

230 years after the Constitution, we’re walking a dangerous road 

from The Rutherford Institute: A look at what it means to live under the Constitution today.
The Government is Not Us

🎬  Walter E Williams - What is a Right? 

from LibertyPen: There are many misconceptions about what constitutes a right. Professor Williams provides clarity.
Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

Court lets DEA keep evidence from warrantless search 

from TechDirt: The government's lawyers with robes conveniently decided that possible cause is just as good as probable cause. The state may do as it pleases. The Constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment are now officially gutted.
The Government is Not Us

A case against the minimum wage 

from Forbes: The case AGAINST minimum wage is the case FOR economic liberty. Supporters focus only on the beneficiaries without regard to those shut out of the job market each time the entry bar is raised.
Regulation Nation

What does child porn smell like? DHS is training dogs to sniff it out 

from ReasonTV: This may not qualify as politically correct, but it is hard to contest this being filed under other nitwittery.
Political Correctness and Other Nitwittery

Permanent reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA 'borders on insanity' 

from The Caldwell County News: The This would be a final and permanent nail in the coffin for the Fourth Amendment.
Say goodbye to the notion of the "sovereign citizen".
Government is Watching Every Move You Make

VIDEO: Grandma Schools DUI Checkpoint Cop - Inspiring!

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

7 Harsh Realities Of Life Millennials Need To Understand

A guide to the real world.      Millennials. They may not yet be the present, but they’re certainly the future. These young, uninitiated minds will someday soon become our politicians, doctors, scientists, chefs, television producers, fashion designers, manufacturers, and, one would hope, the new proponents of liberty. But are they ready for it?   ... MORE

Protesting Donald Trump Is Now A Federal Crime

by Anthony L. Fisher.     The state of free speech in America. The Orwellian-named "free speech zones" on college campus and political rallies are nothing new to regular readers of Reason, and suppressing political dissent with the brute force of government has been a feature of the American system since shortly after 9/11/01, when the     ... MORE

VIDEO: Why We're Losing Liberty

What Are My Rights If The Police Want To Search My Car?

Just say no.   Police are only allowed to search your vehicle under very limited circumstances.   However, too many consent to incriminating searches because they do not know they can refuse or they feel intimidated. This information about police and vehicle searches can help you if you face one of these encounters.  It cannot be          ... MORE

Multiculturalism Trumps Protecting Women From Rape

by Dennis Prager.   Since the scores of New Year's Eve sexual attacks on German women by hundreds of men identified as Arab or North African, the left in Germany has faced a dilemma: which to fight for first -- women's human rights or multiculturalism? This was the same dilemma that faced British authorities between 1997 and 2013. During those  ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: 'Messing With The Constitution'

Taking power back from lawyers in robes.     In recent years, a small but growing number of people have advocated a convention of states to propose amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The reaction to the proposal has been hostile, out of all proportion to either the originality or the danger of such a convention. The political   ... MORE

VIDEO: Trey Gowdy - Infringement Of The 2nd Amendment