Chris Ladd: Who Still Supports The Drug War?

Politicians hide from the issue.    Last month Pat Robertson, televangelist and long-time icon of the religious right, announced that it's time to legalize marijuana. The firestorm of shock and indignation from all sides ... never materialized. Not a whimper. Who still supports our prohibition strategy in the War on Drugs? You won't find a single major political ... MORE

VIDEO: Houstonians Revolt Over TSA On Buses

Patrick Brennan: Public-Employee Unions Gone Wild

The expectation of retirement at 47. Terry List, a teacher in Saginaw Township, Mich., has a depressing lesson for her students: “I would not recommend to my pupils to become a teacher in Michigan.” What’s discouraging her? A proposed pension-reform bill in Michigan would derail her plans to retire — at age 47. After these rapacious reforms, List  ... MORE

Steven Greenhut: How Big Government Is Killing California

Bad destination for entrepreneurs, free spirits and dreamers. The new USC study pointing to a much-slower population growth rate in California has been greeted by demographers and urban planners as good news, in that it supposedly gives our state’s leaders a little breathing room to plan better for the future. The rate of growth has slowed to ... MORE

Eric Peters: 'Your' Car Won't Be After 2015

After a certain point, it's not paranoia. The latest brick in the wall is the predictably named "Moving Ahead For Progress in the 21st Century Act," also known as Senate Bill 1813. (See here for the full text of the bill itself; the relevant section is 31406.) This legislation -- already passed by the Senate and likely to be passed by the House -- will impose a legal        ... MORE

John Stossel: The Assault On Food

Instinct tells us to fear poison.   If our ancestors were not cautious about what they put in their mouths, they would not have survived long enough to produce us. Unfortunately, a side effect of that cautious impulse is that whenever someone claims that some chemical — or food ingredient, like fat — is a menace, we are primed to believe it. That makes it   ... MORE

VIDEO: Milton Friedman - Stimulus and Inflation

Deroy Murdock: CAFE Standards Kill

In a crash, MPG is a small consolation. As Washington keeps yanking money from Americans’ wallets, car prices are set to rise beyond the reach of low-income drivers. And from there, things grow deadly. At fault is a regulatory regime called Corporate Average Fuel Economy, commonly called CAFE standards. Congress mandated these rules in 1975, during a   ... MORE

Glenn Greenwald: Obama Justice And Medical Marijuana

Crackdown justification must heard to be believed.   President Obama gave an interview to Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner this week and was asked about his administration’s aggressive crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries, including ones located in states where medical marijuana is legal and which are licensed by the state; this policy is directly    ... MORE

VIDEO: Using Regulation As Protection From Competition

Howard Rich: Son Of SOPA

Another clear and present danger to our liberty.    Having failed earlier this year to foist an Orwellian kill switch on Internet free speech, Congress is now peddling a kinder, gentler piece of “cybersecurity legislation.” However, Washington’s latest attempt to play Big Brother on the Internet poses an equally clear and present danger to our     ... MORE

Ronald Bailey: Can Censorship Stop Bioterrorism?

Open science is the best defense to flu attack.    In January, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) recommended that the journals Nature and Science restrict publication of controversial new research relevant to the transmission of avian flu between humans. The fear: Would-be bioterrorists may be combing the pages of  ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: Self-Defense Under Attack

A blind disregard for the evidence.   Critics of Florida's self-defense law object to its recognition of a right to "stand your ground" in public places, which eliminated the duty to retreat from an assailant. Yet many of these critics seem to believe they have a duty to stand their ground and never retreat, using George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon    ... MORE

Can Fully Informed Juries Help Cannabis Prohibition?

by Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director.    Of the many numerous peaceful and constitutionally-respectful means employed for decades by which cannabis law reformers have been to try to bring about about an end to Cannabis Prohibition laws, one of the most benign, yet most powerful arrows in the activist’s quiver is jury nullification–whereby   ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - The Mystery Of Happiness

RT: TSA Threatens Lockdown Over 4-Year-Old Girl

TSA's high security threat
Stick em up. There could be gun in that teddy bear.    The much-maligned Transport Security Authority (TSA) is once again in hot water after it accused an innocent four-year-old girl of attempted gun smuggling as she hugged her grandmother in the security zone. In a Facebook post that has since gone viral, Michelle Brademeyer describes the story of her    ... MORE

Robert VerBruggen: Making A Hash Of The 2nd Amendment

Ignoring the Founders on gun rights.  Harvard historian Jill Lepore has a piece attacking gun rights in the latest New Yorker, and a follow-up post on the magazine’s website. Most of it is basically what you’d expect: some numbers about gun violence, some horrifying anecdotes about people who’ve misused guns, some reporting from a gun range, some artsy ... MORE

VIDEO: Is Government's Problem Revenue or Spending?

Doug Bandow: A Two Pronged Attack On Liberty

The statist consensus of Democrats and Republicans. The race for the Republican Party presidential nomination is essentially over.  The GOP apparently has decided Mitt Romney is the answer. Unfortunately, that means the question must be pretty dumb. Not that Barack Obama is a better answer.  Both Romney and Obama are enthusiastic       ... MORE

Armstrong Williams: Government And Capitalism

False stimulation masks reality.   Are we not judged by God relative to our kindness to the downtrodden and the disadvantaged? Maybe. But since God created this planet and everything on it, including the laws of nature which dictate that the strong survive and the weak perish, why are models based on those laws so frequently disregarded? Can     ... MORE

Peter Ferrara: Stealing Our Elections

Why AG Holder and ACORN Obama hate Voter ID.  Columnist David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, asks in a recent column, "Can anyone think of an innocuous reason that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder oppose state voter ID laws?" The correct answer is definitely "No!" But even Limbaugh dances around the full answer to the ... MORE

Ronald Bailey: Building A 21st Century FDA

A better way to fast track new pills for old ills.   “FDA is relying on 20th century regulatory science to evaluate 21st century medical products,” declared Food and Drug Administration Commissioner (FDA) Margaret Hamburg back in October 2010. One result: As biotech and medical discoveries accelerate, the number of new drugs approved by the ... MORE