The right to be left alone under relentless assault. If this question had been asked by a fictional character in a spy thriller, it might intrigue you, but you wouldn't imagine that it could be true in reality. If the Constitution means what it says, you wouldn't even consider the plausibility of an affirmative answer. After all, the Fourth Amendment to the ... MORE
Thomas Sowell: Back To The Future?
What lies at the bottom of slippery slopes. When a 1942 Supreme Court decision that most people never heard of makes the front page of the New York Times in 2012, you know that something unusual is going on. What makes that 1942 case -- Wickard v. Filburn -- important today is that it stretched the federal government's power so far that the Obama ... MORE
Christopher Chantrill: The Science Of Half-Baked Ideas
Saving the planet from second-rate scientists. The more we learn about climate science, the more we learn what a shabby, back-of-the-envelope business it is. Dr. Michael Mann, the climate science poster boy who simplified the global climate of the last millennium into a hockey stick, just came out with a book to remind us how anyone who disagrees with ... MORE
Labels:
bureaucracy,
climate,
environment,
global warming,
government,
politics,
regulation,
science
Danielle Sullivan: Political Correctness Runs Amok In N.Y.
Words banned as protection from "unpleasant emotions." In an extreme case of political correctness, New York City has recently created a list of words that will be banned from New York State tests. You might be thinking that perhaps the words might be slanderous or even elude to atrocities, like slavery, and while words pertaining to slavery have ... MORE
Everybody's A Target In The American Surveillance State
by John W. Whitehead. In the small town of Bluffdale, Utah, not far from bustling Salt Lake City, the federal government is quietly erecting what will be the crown jewel of its surveillance empire. Rising up out of the desert landscape, the Utah Data Center (UDC)—a $2 billion behemoth designed to house a network of computers, satellites, and phone lines that ... MORE
Labels:
bureaucracy,
database,
government,
liberty,
NSA,
police state,
snooping,
spying,
surveillance
Gene Healy: Busybodies Of The World, Unite!
Nannies seeking to deny you pleasure for your own good. A smoke, a drink, and maybe a bag of chips in the privacy of your own home—they're the guilty pleasures of life for many of us. But it's increasingly hard to escape those who want to deny them to you—for your own good. To take one small but irritating example, this Wednesday, the city council of ... MORE
Labels:
alcohol,
busybody,
food,
individual liberty,
legislation,
nanny state,
regulation,
smoking,
sugar
Brian Phillips: Steve Jobs Versus Barney Frank
Steve Jobs and Barney Frank are very different men: Jobs is a tech-savvy entrepreneur; Frank is a stodgy politician. Jobs is West coast; Frank is East coast. Jobs is easy to like; Frank is easy to loathe. But the differences go beyond the obvious. Steve Jobs creates delightful products that consumers willingly and eagerly buy. Barney Frank issues edicts... MORE
Katie Kieffer: Gays, Females And Equals
Gays are not merely bodies desiring homosexual action. Women are not walking uteruses. Gays and women are dignified human beings with reason, spirit and individuality. The Constitution considers Americans with respect to our humanity and citizenship, not our sexuality. So when politicians and sexual minority activists lobby for gay and female ... MORE
Labels:
Constitution,
contraception,
freedom,
gay rights,
government,
politicians,
reason,
sex,
women
Robert Knight: Taming The EPA Monster
Supreme Court ruling strikes a blow in ongoing battle. Slowly, inexorably, the monster is being driven back to its lair. Its days of terrorizing villagers may soon be over. I wish I were talking about the federal government, but it’s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), better known as the Environmental Protection-or-else Agency. ... MORE
John Stossel: Everyone Out Of The Pool
More money for lawyers! Every year, federal government bureaucrats work hard to come up with some 80,000 pages of new and proposed regulations. That's a lot of pages -- 23 feet high if you stack them in one pile. One rule that just went effect, which you can find by flipping to page 56,236 of the 2010 regulations, will require all hotels with a pool ... MORE
Mark Steyn: The Sun Also Sets
National debt to enter its "sudden" phase. I was in Australia earlier this month and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not ... MORE
Walter E Williams: Why Racial Profiling Exists
Human beings do not have god-like insight. Right now, there isn't enough known about the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black, by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old part-Hispanic, during his neighborhood watch tour in an Orlando, Fla., suburb. If evidence emerges that Zimmerman's actions were not ... MORE
Doug Hornig: What If You Could Put On A Thinking Cap?
Could a nine-volt battery be better than coffee? "Flow." Although it can be annoying difficult to define with any precision and virtually impossible to measure objectively, everyone intuitively knows what it is, and most people have experienced some form of it at one time or another. It's that state of effortless concentration that leads to superior performance, either ... MORE
Labels:
achievement,
drugs,
goals,
individual liberty,
intelligence,
production,
self-interest,
thinking
Anthony W. Hager: Pity The Poor Working Chump
50 years worth of war on poverty has produced little benefit, save for a few valuable lessons. For instance, we've learned about the valiant struggle the disadvantaged wage against capitalist oppression. The homeless, the hungry, and the downtrodden are victims of free-market greed. But there's one participant in Washington's war on poverty who's routinely ignored... MORE
Labels:
capitalism,
charity,
economics,
entitlements,
poverty,
production,
taxpayer,
welfare,
workers
Star Parker: ObamaCare Undermines Founding Principles
When we lose freedom, we lose everything. As the Supreme Court starts its three day marathon to hear arguments on the constitutionality of Obamacare, let’s be clear about their challenge, and ours. The challenge before the Court, a challenge it has often not lived up to, is to keep perspective that applying our constitution is not about splitting ... MORE
Jacob Sullum: The Freakin' FCC
The incomprehensible ban on broadcast indecency. My daughters, who range in age from 5 to 18, watch TV programs and movies on DVDs, on smart phones, streaming from Netflix through our Wii, on video websites, on our DVR, and on demand from AT&T U-verse. They do not know or care what “broadcast television” is, and they ... MORE
Labels:
bureaucracy,
censorship,
FCC,
First Amendment,
free speech,
government,
politics,
regulation
Robert Goldberg: Drugs Of Choice
Some balk at FDA flirtation with medical freedom. Next week, the FDA will be holding a hearing about letting consumers buy commonly used prescription drugs without a prescription, signaling FDA recognition that empowering consumers to make health care choices is the key to better health at a lower cost. The agency’s proposal is a refreshing ... MORE
Labels:
bureaucracy,
choice,
consumer,
drugs,
FDA,
individualism,
medicine,
regulation,
self-interest
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)