Vince Miller, founder and president of the International Society for Individual Liberty and friend of the Independent Institute’s, has passed on. He died Saturday morning of Valley Fever, at 69-years-old. Vince was one of the longest-active, hardest working, tireless and good-natured champions of freedom and peace in the libertarian movement. He was always friendly,...
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After the 2006 Congressional election, I rhetorically asked, “Will the Democrats Save Our Civil Liberties?” Now we have the clear answer with the top Democrats totally caving in to Bush’s requests for unchecked, unilateral warrantless domestic spying powers. Along with almost half the House Democrats, Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama has just now...
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John Stossel has a great piece arguing for a full end to drug prohibition, dispensing with some of the more pervasive drug war propaganda. He rips apart some of the myths out there, but I especially appreciate his moral argument that adults have a right to poison themselves: “[A]dults ought to own our own...
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Several years ago a cottage industry of books devoted to critiquing America’s colleges and universities popped up and revealed widespread dissatisfaction with academia. The Independent Institute entered the fray by publishing the books The Academy in Crisis: The Political Economy of Higher Education, edited by John Sommer (1995); The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the...
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Affordable health insurance is ILLEGAL in many states. The Wall Street Journal, among others, has pointed out how one-thousand-plus mandates in New Jersey balloon the premiums to a figure SIX times as high as Kentucky. Want some health insurance? Gotta buy the gold-plated coverage required by law (hair transplants and all). Endless government mandates...
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Here’s my op-ed on the recent decision regarding habeas corpus and Guantanamo, and what the debate means.

I had expected McCain to adopt more free market friendly rhetoric in the months before the election to reassure the skitish conservative base. This isn’t happening and that’s a good thing. The real McCain keeps coming to the surface: “I believe there needs to be a thorough and complete investigation of speculators to find...
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They struck a major blow for habeas corpus and against the total despotism of Bushianism. Poor Scalia, the conservative, laments and dissents that “most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of...
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Despite extremely rare and totally unexplainable spurts of rebellion such as the election of Jesse Ventura, the ideological default in my home state of Minnesota is the grinding conformity of nanny-statism. Most folks there still believe that government actually works if the right people are running things, and is “our collective voice.” A recent illustration...
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Libertarians rightfully question the trustworthiness of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, a few have carried this skepticism to the ridiculous extreme of accepting harebrained theories that 9/11 was an “inside job” and, even more unbelievably, that our bungling federal bureaucrats would be capable of pulling off this imagined vast conspiracy. Few are better at refuting...
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