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President Obama may be poised to claim an unprecedented executive power. Or not. It depends on whether you credit official denials from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney or public statements from high-ranking Democrats. The monarchical power in question ...
With the media obsessing about the fiscal cliff, many people may not have noticed that net American taxes for the next decade just rose by around $1 trillion. That’s the cost of the first phase of the Patient Protection ...
As of December 19 at 11:50:59 a.m. GMT, the national debt of the federal government was $16,357,278,240,896.86, or $52,080.07 for every individual in the United States. The only sane and moral stance is to repudiate it entirely.
“Repudiation” ...
On December 7, President Obama signed the Child Protection Act of 2012. The act continues a political trend that harms children psychologically and endangers them physically — namely, the trend of fearmongering about child abuse.
Certainly, child abuse exists, ...
Freedom of religion is the most powerful constitutional protection left in America. It is on a collision course with the contraception mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The mandate requires employers with more than 50 ...
Unions are now more empowered and more desperate.
They feel empowered because a radically pro-union president has been elected for a second term. An Investor’s Business Daily headline (Nov. 21) proclaimed, “With Obama Win, Big Labor Feels Its Oats.” ...
A racial agenda is about to be unleashed on America. According to Investor’s Business Daily (Nov. 8), the Obama administration intends to eliminate the “persistent gaps” between whites and minorities “in everything from credit scores and homeownership ...
On November 2 the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that America added 171,000 jobs in October. President Barack Obama lost no time in proclaiming to crowds, “Today we learned that our companies have created more jobs ...
On October 22, an Italian court found six seismologists and one government official guilty of multiple involuntary manslaughter for failing to accurately predict an earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, which killed around 300 people. The trial lasted from September ...
Florida v. Jardines and Florida v. Harrisare scheduled to be heard by the United States Supreme Court on Wednesday, October 31. The cases pivot on whether the ...
Some news stories break your heart. On October 9, in Pakistan, 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot twice in the head by Taliban gunmen. She is being treated in a hospital in Birmingham, England, where she was moved ...
According to Homeland Security Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has forged “a new partnership” with “the Department of Transportation (DOT) and Amtrak to battle the trafficking of humans.”
DHS will train “over 8,000 frontline transportation employees ...
A few days ago, the Rev. Al Sharpton dramatically warned that “50 years of progress” for blacks could be “erased with one ruling” by the United States Supreme Court.
The case is Fisher v. University of ...
“I can’t understand why any woman would want to vote for Mitt Romney, except maybe Mrs. Romney.” The words came from Democrat and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
The words are part of a great lie being ...
Officials at Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas, apparently view George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale.
Over 6,000 students will be required to carry microchipped ID so that ...
The United States Constitution recognizes American prisons as forced-labor camps. The Thirteenth Amendment, enacted in 1865 to outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude, includes an exception. It reads,
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime ...
On June 25, the Institute for Justice (IJ) announced a life-saving development. It is now legal to compensate people for supplying bone marrow to those with cancer or blood diseases. The impressive victory took close to three ...
On July 27, an American court for the first time offered a tentative ruling on whether Obamacare outranks the religious rights of business owners. At issue is the Obamacare provision that requires companies with more than 50 ...
Since June 19, WikiLeaks whistle-blower Julian Assange has eluded the British authorities by secreting himself within the diplomatically shielded Ecuadorian embassy in London. On June 14, Assange's final appeal against his extradition to Sweden was rejected by the British ...
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is stomping its jackboot down on two little towns that straddle the Arizona-Utah border. The Civil Rights Division has brought an unprecedented and vague federal religious discrimination lawsuit against the cities and their utility ...
A friend just experienced a terrible drug problem. Not with illegal drugs, but with a prescription from her doctor. Her eighty-year-old memory sometimes stumbles, and so, without diagnostic tests, the doctor prescribed a potent Alzheimer medication.
Within a week, I ...
The rather dry matter of executive privilege is becoming a hot talking point in the news. This power of the executive branch is the latest battleground between the president and a largely hostile Congress. The Republican congressman ...
It is called a “voluntary safety plan.” Using the plan, Child Protective Services (CPS) can bypass the constitutional rights of parents and take children away from non-abusive homes. (Note: agencies function under different names from state to state, but ...
The show trial of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on a citation of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena is scheduled to climax on June 20. That's when the investigating Oversight Committee has called ...
The upcoming presidential election may well have saved the American family farm — at least, temporarily. The votes in several agricultural swing states are up for grabs, and so the Obama administration has declared a strategic cease-fire in ...
Various American regulatory agencies have criminalized the sale and the distribution of raw milk, allegedly as a means of protecting the welfare of consumers. The government claims unpasteurized milk is dangerous because it has not been treated ...
Barack Obama is buying votes. The Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA) is a blatant sop thrown to a voting block on which his next presidency may depend: women, specifically, liberal women. Obama also hopes it will ...
A destructive belief seems poised to unfold within the public-school system in the form of new policies. The Department of Education (ED) is threatening to conduct “disparate impact” inquiries on schools that have a higher punishment, expulsion, ...
A terrible term has entered the healthcare debate now raging in Britain: “lifestyle rationing.” Given the predictability with which social trends cross the Atlantic, and given a looming Obamacare, Americans would be wise to eavesdrop closely on this conversation.
“Lifestyle ...
On April 26, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 248 to 168. CISPA seeks to grease the sharing of data about people between government and big ...
Last week, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) extended its reach and tightened its grip on every cent Americans earn or try to preserve anywhere in the world. The final regulations of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) were ...
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (March 24, 1855 – December 11, 1920) lived with rare courage in a world where women were born into acquiescence. As the daughter of British missionaries to South Africa, she was also born into Empire, ...
On February 26, a 17-year-old black youth named Trayvon Martin was walking at night in an area where he had every right to be. A self-appointed captain of the neighborhood watch named George Zimmerman found the unarmed Trayvon “suspicious” ...
A March 23rd headline in the tech zine ZDNet caused a buzz on the blogosphere. It reads, “Facebook: Legal Action against Employers Asking for Your Password.” The article explained, “The social networking giant is considering using the law ...
One of the few rights prisoners do not give up upon incarceration is that of due process. At least, this used to be the case. On February 20th, in Howes v. Fields, the United States Supreme Court ruled that ...
The newest attack of vague language is aimed at your 1st Amendment rights of Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly and Freedom to Petition. It is found in the pending legislation of H.R. 347.… As currently worded, ...
They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
— English folk poem
An understanding of the Enclosure Acts is ...
KOMO News reports (Jan. 4) that the City of Seattle is taking an attorney to court because he requested public records.
The legal tug-of-war that will almost certainly ensue has national importance, not only because the lawsuit sets a ...
Despite a proclaimed opposition to new taxes, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has advanced a policy that amounts to a new and draconian tax. People will have to pay the state for the privilege of free speech and assembly. To ...
John Adams, the first vice-president of the United States (17891797), once exclaimed, My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
A century later, ...
Globalization has been a buzzword for decades. The word has competing definitions: It can refer to the reduction of barriers to trade and travel, which allows goods, ideas, and people to act as though the world is one free-flowing ...
From September 1939 to December 1941, Americans debated the role the United States should play in World War II, which was then ravaging Europe. Should America actively support the Allies, especially Britain, by providing direct financial and indirect military ...
The New American (15/11) states,
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is backing a controversial component of an existing computer fraud law that makes it a crime to use a fake name on Facebook or embellish your weight on ...
Is Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain guilty of sexually harassing women? Only the people directly involved know for sure. But so many high-profile cases of alleged sexual abuse have crumbled under scrutiny for example, Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged ...
The legal doctrine of double jeopardy may be in flux (again), this time in a murder case being reviewed by the United States Supreme Court.
An October 11 CNN report opens, “The justices on Tuesday accepted the appeal of ...
A common accusation hurled at libertarians is that they do not champion or, indeed, care about the rights and status of minorities. A common misconception is that the Left has historically been the defender of the oppressed. Those who wish ...
If “money talks,” then a global campaign is being waged to silence it or, at least, to let cash speak only with permission.
The Economic Collapse blog states, “All over the world, governments are either placing stringent reporting requirements ...
The transition to a police state will not come about with a dramatic coup d'etat, with battering rams and marauding militia. As we have experienced first-hand in recent years, it will creep in softly, one violation at a time, ...
Being innocent does not matter. Not being arrested or convicted of a crime is no protection. With amazing ease, the government can take everything you own. And to recover it, you must prove your innocence through an expensive and ...
Since September, a public-school district in Florida has been taking fingerprint scans at the entrance to schools as a way to monitor attendance. The scans are compared against a database of students to detect truants. As in most ...
Gov.Rick Snyder of Michigan wants doctors to track the body mass index (BMI) of children through a database that currently tracks immunizations and then to report the collected data to the state. (BMI is the ratio between ...
George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, got a few things wrong — for example, the date. But he was dead-on in depicting the cause-and-effect relationship between language and politics, between language and our ability to think clearly; the process of ...
New Jersey has provided a blueprint on how not to solve a social problem. The blueprint will almost certainly create a barrage of new difficulties without relieving the old one.
The “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights Act” took effect ...
When police brutality cannot be covered up or dismissed by blaming the victim, the next official line is often the “bad apple” defense. The popular phrase “one bad apple can spoil the bunch” generally means that one person’s behavior ...
Murray Rothbard once spoke fondly of the 19th-century New York politician William M. (“Boss”) Tweed who was notoriously corrupt. Why? Because Tweed operated before the days of Public Relations, in the days when a crook was a crook and ...
August 20 is Lemonade Freedom Day and everyone who can do so is asked to set up a stand; everyone else is urged to imbibe. The reason? Authorities across America are closing down kids’ lemonade stands because, ...
A scandal rocking the British Isles is slopping onto American shores.
In its zeal to scoop the news, a British paper within Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire engaged in illegal and immoral activities. Specifically, the News of the ...
Few activities are as dangerous as watching a cop too closely, as John Kurtz knows well. Kurtz is the founder of the Orlando, Florida, branch of CopWatch, a network of activists in the United States and Canada ...
If you fly within the United States in the future, keep your expression neutral, do not blink too much or too little, and do not sweat. Carefully maintain a normal respiration and heart beat as you submit to demands ...
On March 11, 2010, Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss asked an intriguing question: “Why is the Education Department purchasing 27 Remington Brand Model 870 police 12-gauge shotguns?”
On June 7, 2011, the answer became clear. At 6 a.m. ...
On January 12, 2010, a 12-year-old sixth-grader did an unremarkable thing that almost destroyed a good man and his family. She lied about being touched “inappropriately.”
Under a reasonable legal system, the transparent lie of an angry child would have ...
In early April, the White House warned that President Obama would veto H.R. 1363, which would have provided only short-term defense funding and was being used by the GOP to compel budget cuts.
A few days later, the ...
Americans have been so bombarded with fear-drenched messages about the need to shut out foreign terrorists that few consider whether they are also being shut in.
A 5-page biographical questionnaire, Form DS-5513, is being proposed as a new ...
On April 16 in Richmond, Virginia, Jesus of Nazareth was spared the death penalty but sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for the crime of blasphemy.
Or, rather, a mock courtroom reenacted the sentencing phase ...
“France’s burqa ban: Has Europe forgotten the gas chambers?” The Christian Science Monitor (April 14) headline is followed by the text, “As we’ve seen with France’s burqa ban that went into effect this week, global religious tolerance ...
Planned Parenthood almost closed down the U.S. government last week. A stalemate over the tax-funding of the abortion-provider almost prevented a budget deal needed to keep federal doors open. Ultimately, the Republicans tabled their demand to defund Planned Parenthood; ...
According do a Wall Street Journal editorial (December 7, 2010), “Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Dianne Feinstein called for the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange because he ‘continues to violate ... the Espionage Act of 1917.’” Assange’s ...
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On other issues, Auberon Herbert predictably sided with working people. In 1869, he acted as one of the presidents of the first national Cooperative Congress. As its name suggests, the Cooperative movement focused on ...
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In his periodical Liberty, (May 23, 1885), the quintessential American individualist-anarchist Benjamin Tucker wrote of his British counterpart Auberon Herbert, “I know of no more inspiring spectacle in England than that of this man ...
The Physiocrats, a group of 18th-century French economists, are often credited with founding Western political economy — the study of “laws” governing the production and distribution of wealth.
The word “law” is not used in a legal sense. Rather it ...
Legal and political trends in the United Kingdom often parallel or precede ones within the United States. For example, the politically correct crusades against smoking and child obesity raged in Britain prior to jumping the Atlantic.
A particularly interesting trend ...
The movie V for Vendetta (V) is a thriller set in London’s dystopian future of 2020, where an anti-government anti-hero named “V” (played by Hugo Weaving) uses violence to bring down a totalitarian right-wing state called Norsefire. ...
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Hoiles began his newspaper career by working for the Alliance Review (Ohio), a daily owned by his brother Frank. In 1919, he and Frank bought the Lorain Times ...
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The libertarian publishing giant Raymond Cyrus Hoiles created the newspaper and media chain known as Freedom Communications. He was an immensely successful businessman who opposed all governmental privileges ...
The renowned playwright Oscar Wilde once said, “A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.” At the height of his career in 1895, Wilde dominated London dinner-tables, stages, and opinion. Two of his plays opened ...
Good Night, and Good Luck was the television sign-off of Edward R. Murrow (19081965) the journalistic pioneer often considered to be the finest broadcast news commentator produced by America.
Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) is also an Oscar-nominated docudrama ...
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Liberty first appeared on August 6, 1881, from Boston, where Tucker worked as a journalist with the Boston Globe; later, in 1892, Liberty moved to New York City, where it was published ...
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The first issue of the radical individualist periodical Liberty (1881–1908) opened with the words,
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, these three: but the greatest of these is Liberty. Formerly the price of Liberty was ...
The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Die letzten Tage) depicts the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Magdalena Scholl (May 9, 1921 February 22, 1943). Sophie and her brother, Hans, were leading members of a nonviolent resistance group called ...
Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) is one of the best movies you’ve never seen. This incredible drama hit the big screen for two seconds before skidding into rental stores, where it failed to find the wider ...
In 1853, Lucretia Mott described the Quaker women of the Massachusetts community into which she had been born. “Look at the heads of those women; they can mingle with men; they are not triflers; they have intelligent subjects of ...
The Castle is a tacky tract house in Melbourne, Australia, where the quirky Kerrigans live in the firm belief that they are the luckiest family in the world. Their house is so close to the airport that planes almost ...
O, why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like this envious race?
Why did Heaven adorn me with bountiful hand,
And then set me down in an envious land?
William Blake’s poem “Mary” (1803) could have been ...
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The right of people to defend themselves against the usurpation of government was the central theme of Spooner’s next major work, An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), which some consider ...
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The 19th-century individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker called Lysander Spooner “our Nestor,” a Greek name denoting “wisdom.” The 20th-century libertarian Murray Rothbard referred to Spooner as “the last of the great natural rights ...
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Thoreau’s criticism is aimed at the form of obedience that springs from a genuine respect for the authority of the state. This obedience says, “The law is the law and ...
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Although many Quaker writers had argued from conscience for civil disobedience against war and slavery, Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” essay is not tied to a particular religion or to ...
Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America: The Woman and the Dynamo
by Stephen Cox
Some readers of Stephen Cox’s recently published biography, Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America: The Woman and ...
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Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an introspective man who wandered the woods surrounding the small village of Concord, Massachusetts, recording the daily growth of plants and the migration of birds ...
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In Europe, the tensions that would become World War II were already apparent. In fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini dreamed of reviving the glory of Rome and he looked to Africa ...
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Nineteeth-century Europe revolutionized trade through the development of steam power that sent trains across continents and large cargo ships across the sea. Construction projects, such as the Suez Canal, were ...
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Until recently, Western scholarship ignored West Africa. The blind spot reflects Europes historical view of Africa as a continent to be exploited, not examined. To Europe, Africa was a market ...
On October 3, 1995, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murder by a jury in criminal court. On February 4, 1997, a civil jury found him liable for the death of Ronald ...
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In the North, treatment of Catholics deteriorated as one of the most infamous measures in Irish history was passed — the Special Powers Act of 1922. ...
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In 1912, Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith introduced a “Government of Ireland Bill” that attempted to establish an Irish parliament with a popularly elected lower house ...
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In the 1840s, a new voice would be heard in Ireland: the Young Irelanders, who urged the Catholic peasantry to return to their Gaelic roots. Literary ...
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Irish history has been likened to the cry of wind through a ruined house because so much of it deals with destruction and the breaking of ...
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“Counterinsurgency” became the new American buzzword and Vietnam became the testing ground, with American leaders looking to apply its lessons elsewhere — for example, in Cuba. The Kennedy administration developed ...
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With American encouragement, Diem defied the deadline for a national election. This signaled the beginning of a struggle to the death with Hanoi. Until then, the North had waited to ...
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One lesson offered to America by the Vietnam War is the folly of forcing regime change in a nation whose religion, culture, history, and politics differ dramatically from its own.
As ...
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In 1936, the Arabs went on a six-month general strike, seeking both economic reforms and a moratorium on all debt. The Arabs would call off the strike if the British ...
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The Arabs would not have fought so bravely had they known of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which had been signed by the Entente in May of 1916. In essence, the Agreement ...
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The modern-day Middle East centers on Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt — clustered close to the Mediterranean Sea. Lying near the juncture of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the ...
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National attention soon focused on whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state — a matter that affected the balance of power in the Senate. The ...
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On August 31, 1831, a Virginia slave named Nat Turner instigated a slave revolt in which a slave owner and his family were killed.
Eventually, the victims of Turner’s band exceeded ...
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“Resolved, that the compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell — involving both parties in atrocious criminality — ...
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The beginning of a tyrant’s rule was the most difficult period because those who had not consented to his rule would obey reluctantly, and brute force might be necessary. Brute force could put down ...
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A 16th-century essay entitled Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by the French jurist Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563) discusses a question that haunts those who love liberty: Why do people obey unjust laws?
The ...
BENJAMIN TUCKER, editor of Liberty (1881–1908) and the prototypical 19th-century radical libertarian, constantly experimented with strategies to educate people away from government. He particularly delighted in anti-government stickers, which he declared to be “highly useful” because of their cheapness ...
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1905, labor radicals assembled in Chicago to found a new group the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It operated in competition with the more conservative American Federation of Labor ...
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THE YEARS SURROUNDING Americas involvement in World War I were a watershed for how the United States treated foreigners within its borders during wartime. Immigrants had flooded the United States in the late 19th ...
IN GRAPPLING with the same strategic questions that confront modern libertarianism, the 19th-century movement evolved a remarkable organization that engaged in both education and grassroots activism.
The New England Labor Reform League ...
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The key issue around which the free-soil debate revolved was slavery. Specifically, the question was whether slavery would be extended into the territories that were expected to seek statehood.
Both anti-slavery farmers and slave-owners had been ...
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In 1837, in order to encourage a westward migration of the poor and unemployed from the industrial East, the journalist Horace Greeley proclaimed, “Go West, young man, go forth into the Country.”
The vast public ...
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Why, then, does boycott in the form of strikes and blacklists elicit such public condemnation? The 19th-century libertarian Steven Byington offered an explanation: The State is afraid of it. The boycott offers a means ...
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The current disillusionment with politicians — which may be Clinton’s true legacy — will be positive only if it becomes disillusionment with the political means itself. Otherwise, people will continue to look primarily to ...
The Contagious Disease Acts (1860s) in Britain occasioned "the western world's first feminine revolt of any stature." So wrote historian Michael Pearson in his book The Age of Consent: Victorian Prostitution and Its Enemies. The revolt was for sexual ...
A prominent difference between the 19th-century libertarian movement and the contemporary one lies in their attitudes toward working people. These are people who are not primarily interested in reading economic or political theory but who focus their energies instead ...
It is 1858 and you are living in a Northern town. A man has arrived at your door with papers documenting his ownership of a runaway slave whom you are sheltering. The slave ...
Mystification is the process by which the commonplace is elevated to the level of the divine by those who have a vested interest in its unassailability. Government is a perfect example of mystification ...