President Obama has called the Secret Service prostitution scandal a “little distracting” and has emphasized that “99.9 percent” of the time the agency does its job professionally. “A couple of knuckleheads shouldn’t detract from what they do,” he says, although there are perhaps as many as twelve agents implicated in the “knuckleheaded” behavior. This...
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When goods and services are free, people tend to consume more of them. Does this maxim apply to government spending and taxation? In other words, when people can receive federal benefits without paying taxes, do they demand more of them even if they’re funded by deficits? That possibility troubled John C. Calhoun. In 1810,...
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Assuming his guilt of all the criminal charges leveled at Edwards, he is indeed an even more unsavory person than I always believed. Since I never liked him at all, this is no faint condemnation. Nevertheless, I find it horrendous that he faces up to 30 years in prison for these dirty deeds. Consider...
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Even with that caveat, it is a rare thing for me to say. But I agree with the thrust of Ann Coulter’s latest column, and the main argument she has been making in her media appearances about it: Those who fear anti-black racism should favor that blacks arm themselves. Even more important, we should...
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This article from The Globalist argues that the welfare state in the United States is roughly the same size as in Europe, where Americans tend to think the welfare state has spiraled out of control. The main reason the US welfare state is closer in size to the welfare states in EU countries than...
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In Georgia, a six-year-old girl threw a temper tantrum, and so police handcuffed her, took her to the station, and charged her with assault and property damage. She was suspended from school until August.

How has the vision of our forebears—of men and women, black, white, and every other complexion, standing tall, shoulder to shoulder, in free and full access to equal opportunities and enjoying the blessings of equal rights in the sanctity of our persons and property—devolved to skirmishes among dependent subjects of the state over the...
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Conventional wisdom today is that the threat of inflation is low, despite the Fed’s easy money policy, and notwithstanding some economists in the minority (I’m in that minority) who see the Fed’s easy money policy as laying the groundwork for inflation. The March Consumer Price Index (CPI) numbers were recently released, so let’s see...
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Radley Balko has a great roundup of bloggers’ reactions to the Zimmerman indictment. The common thrust in most of these responses is that the prosecution has gone too far, based on the available evidence it promises to show, to pursue second-degree murder charges. No doubt the media frenzy brought about this prosecution in the...
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Libertarian Heroes in Fiction, Part 1 With more than 25 million copies of her novels in print, and with Atlas Shrugged continuing to sell a brisk half million copies per year, Ayn Rand undoubtedly ranks as the most widely read libertarian novelist. Much of her popularity, of course, is due to her unswerving commitment...
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