Hornberger's Blog

Hornberger's Blog is a daily libertarian blog written by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of FFF.
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Foreign-Policy Pickle

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It’s becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. interventionist crowd is finding itself in a pickle with respect to the U.S. government’s 12-year occupation of Afghanistan and 12-year “war on terrorism. “ On the one hand, we have President Obama’s announcement that he’s going to end the Afghan occupation by 2014. On the other hand, we all know that there are ...

Dying from Green on Blue

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Do you ever wonder about the final thoughts of a U.S. soldier who has just been shot by one of his compatriots in the Afghan army? After all, his killer is one of the guys he’s been training and supporting in the Pentagon’s 12-year project to “rebuild Afghanistan.” The GI turns his back, finds himself riddled with bullets from ...

Minimum-Wage Folly

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One of the most interesting, albeit frustrating, aspects of being a libertarian is having to repeatedly show the fallacies behind statist thinking. No matter how many times we libertarians destroy statist reasoning behind statist policies, the statists just keep coming back and proposing the same fallacious and destructive policies. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon involves the minimum wage, ...

How to Balance the Budget without Raising Taxes

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John Cornyn, the U.S. Senator from Texas, has ignited a firestorm with an op-ed in which he stated that it might be necessary to “partially shut down the government” as part of the upcoming debt-ceiling debate in “our ongoing fight to bring fiscal sanity to Washington.” Cornyn correctly points out that the “biggest fiscal problem in Washington is excessive ...

The Corrosive Effects of the National-Security State

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Last Sunday besieged Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad delivered a public speech at which he condemned the Syrians who are trying to oust him from power as “murderous criminals” and “terrorists.” According to a Syrian shopkeeper quoted in a New York Times article about the speech, Assad “divided Syrians in two camps, one with him who are patriots and ...

The Fascinating Case of Lynne Stewart

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Lynne Stewart is a New York attorney who is serving a 10-year sentence in the federal penitentiary for being a supporter of terrorism. Her crime? Two years after the 9/11 attacks, she read the following message from her client, convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman, at a press conference in New York City: “I am not withdrawing my support ...

Guns and Tyranny

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There are three important things to remember about the Second Amendment. First, it doesn’t give people the right to own guns. Second, it is an implicit acknowledgement that the U.S. government is the biggest threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people. Third, the rationale for enacting the Second Amendment was to ensure that the American citizenry ...

Don’t Raise the Debt Ceiling

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It’s time for Republicans to do the right thing. It’s time to put the brakes on out-of-control federal spending. The best way to do it is by refusing to lift the debt ceiling when the current ceiling is reached a couple of months from now. As most everyone knows, the federal government is spending some $1.3 trillion dollars more than ...

Fiscal-Cliff Antics

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The fiscal-cliff deal shouldn’t surprise anyone. A sufficient number of Republicans caved, enabling President Obama to bask in the glory of causing Republicans to vote for a massive tax increase. What did the Republicans get in return with respect to federal spending? Not one darned thing. On the contrary, they agreed that the “cuts” in federal spending that were going to ...

Why We Fight

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Given the statist direction in which our nation continues to head, one might be tempted to succumb to despondency. After all, everywhere you look, there’s a crisis, with calls for even more statism to address the crises. The worse things get, the more hopeless the situation might seem for people striving for the triumph of libertarianism. There certainly is no ...

Rendering Conscience unto Caesar

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Yesterday, I pointed out one of the big downsides to the embrace of the national-security-state way of life — that it has induced Americans to maintain a constant state of delusion with respect to U.S. foreign policy. I pointed out how so many Americans have convinced themselves that the troops and the paramilitary forces are spreading goodness and ...

The National Security State’s Embrace of Dictatorships

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The New York Times published an article on December 25 that exposes a harsh reality about U.S. foreign policy to mainstream Americans. The article, entitled “Bahrain, a Brutal Ally,” focuses on one of the principal dark sides of U.S. foreign policy: the U.S. national-security state’s ardent support of brutal dictatorships, this one being Bahrain. Why is the U.S. government ...
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