Jerry Brito: How Much Surveillance Can We Accept?

Are the watchers worthy of our trust?        Three months after Edward Snowden’s leaks began to reveal the extent of the U.S.’s mass surveillance program, “serious people” are beginning to make the case that it’s time for the outrage and indignation to subside and give way to a “national conversation” about the future of surveillance.       ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: High Risk, Low Yield

Can ObamaCare be defunded?      This has been the worst time, politically, for President Barack Obama since he took office. Recent polls reveal that public confidence in both his domestic and foreign policies has been falling, amid revelations about their defects and dangers. Even people who once supported and defended him have now turned  ... MORE

Biden Recruited To Hand Out Free Joints

by Radley Balko.    The Denver Westword reports that a pro-pot group fighting a new proposal to impose a 30 percent tax on the drug -- which is now legal under Colorado law -- wants Joe Biden's help. Earlier this month, a group opposed to Proposition AA, the measure to establish tax rates on recreational marijuana sales in Colorado, staged a rally at Civic   ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Honesty And Trust

Two under-appreciated virtues.       Dishonesty, lying and cheating are not treated with the right amount of opprobrium in today's society. To gain an appreciation for the significance of honesty and trust, consider what our day-to-day lives would be like if we couldn't trust anyone. When we purchase a bottle of 100 pills from our pharmacist, how many ... MORE

Growing Phenomenon Of Police Shooting Unarmed Citizens

by John W. Whitehead.      Here’s a recipe for disaster: Take a young man (or woman), raise him on a diet of violence, hype him up on the power of the gun in his holster and the superiority of his uniform, render him woefully ignorant of how to handle a situation without resorting to violence, train him well in military tactics but allow him to be   ... MORE

VIDEO: John Stossel - Mandatory Minimums

Destroying The Right To Be Left Alone

by Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood.        For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with    ... MORE

Free Speech Is So Annoying To Elected Officials

by A. Barton Hinkle.           “There’s just way too much money in politics,” said a candidate for governor earlier this month. Since the candidate was Terry McAuliffe, a political fundraiser of Brobdingnagian proportions, the remark could go down as the funniest line from this year’s contest. McAuliffe had just been asked if he would       ... MORE

VIDEO: What You Should Know About Drug Prohibition

Katie Kieffer: Pour Me A Vodka, Putin

Bad news for Barack.            For the first time in five years, the conventional media prefers Russian President Vladimir Putin over U.S. President Barack Obama. Has Vladimir sent American journalists cases of Russian vodka? Or are they fed up with Barack? It’s amusing to imagine Putin shipping cases of Russian vodka to American journalists    ... MORE

Brenden Moore: California To Hike Minimum Wage

Increased labor price means increase unemployment.      The question over whether to raise the minimum wage has been brought back to national attention as California prepares to pass a measure setting the highest minimum wage rate in the country. By 2016, the state’s price floor will be $10 per hour. By comparison, the national minimum   ... MORE

Jacob Sullum: The Injustice Of Mandatory Drug Minimums

Rand Paul is right.           Toward the end of a hearing at which the Senate Judiciary Committee heard about the jaw-dropping injustices caused by mandatory minimum sentences, John Cornyn sounded a note of caution. “We have to be careful not to legislate by anecdote,” said the Republican senator from Texas. Why start now? Congress       ... MORE

Chris Hedges: The Origins Of The Police State

We should realize, their fate will soon become ours.    JaQuan LaPierre, 22, was riding a bicycle down a sidewalk Sept. 5 when he noticed a squad car pulling up beside him. It was 8:30 on a hot Thursday night at the intersection of Bond Street and Jackson Avenue here in Elizabeth, N.J. LaPierre had 10 glass vials of crack cocaine—probably what   ... MORE

VIDEO: A Conversation On The Free Market


From Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose" series.

Dr. Helen Smith: The War On Football

Putting risk in perspective.         Sadly, I saw that a former Amazon CFO, Joy Covey, died in a bike crash on Wednesday: She died Wednesday after colliding with a minivan while riding her bicycle downhill on Skyline Blvd. near Portola Valley, Calif., according to Art Montiel, a public information officer at the California Highway Patrol in Redwood  ... MORE

Ed Krayewski: Four Washington Scandals That Still Matter

Despite the distractions.       President Obama’s attempt to lead the United States into an intervention in Syria may have provided the White House a distraction from the summer of scandal, but they’re still there, festering. As the president waddles toward lame duck status, the various scandals will increasingly come to shape Obama’s second term.   ... MORE

VIDEO: Navy Yard Shooting And Gun Control

Larry Elder: Political Correctness In A Gun-Free Zone

A deadly combination.           Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., after another mass shooting, predictably wasted no time in demanding still more gun control legislation. This week, a killer with a valid ID entered the Washington Navy Yard in southeast D.C., a military facility where 16,000 people -- mostly civilians -- work. He killed 12 people     ... MORE

Ken Braun: The Biggest Of Big Government Programs

The war on marijuana.        Some conservative supporters of the War on Drugs like to believe this biggest of Big Government programs is mostly about harder drugs and that marijuana users are not targets. The evidence shows otherwise. Every hour last year, America’s police officers arrested 59 rapists, murderers or other violent criminals. During that     ... MORE

Who Should Make Medical Choices For You?

by Lawrence W. Reed.       Almost a decade ago, I went to Canada to obtain a customized medical procedure on both of my eyes—a procedure not yet approved by federal authorities in the United States. It involved a new “wavefront” LASIK technology designed for patients with a combination of astigmatism and very thin corneas. For more     ... MORE