In immediate response to the Newtown massacre, every pundit began pointing fingers and giving their answers. The problem was gun culture. No, the problem was feminism. Violent video games. Insufficient funding for programs for the mentally ill. Hollywood. Rightwing paranoia. And so on. Now, I have my own views about the cultural conditions in...
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A salmon trap (also known as a pound net) is a setup for catching salmon as they return to their spawning places in the gravel beds of shallow inland streams. Such traps were used in Washington and Oregon until they were outlawed—by Oregon in 1926 and by Washington in 1934—and in Alaska until they...
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As the U.S. government prepared for and then engaged fully in World War II, it made increasingly stringent efforts to control inflation by imposing price controls. Late in 1942, these controls were strengthened substantially, and from early 1943 through mid-1946, when the controls were allowed to lapse, the consumer price index rose very little....
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On or about December 5, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (probably with the aid of one or more speech writers) prepared a speech on U.S. relations with the Far East, in general, and with Japan, in particular. The speech was to be delivered to the Congress in order, as its opening sentence indicates, “to...
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Somehow, left-liberals have associated the cause of gun rights with white racism, when if anything it is gun control that has a racist legacy. In the United States, early gun laws targeted recently freed blacks, and open carry first became banned in California under Governor Ronald Reagan to disarm groups like the Black Panthers....
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In Federalist 62, published in the Independent Journal, February 27, 1788, James Madison writes as follows: It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be...
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When Paul Krugman starts attacking us, we know we’re doing something right. John Maynard Keynes’s presumptive heir, Krugman apparently doesn’t like the findings of our recent book edited by Research Fellow David Beckworth, Boom & Bust Banking: The Causes and Cures of the Great Recession, exposing the profound fallacies of Lord Keynes’s love affair...
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Immigration reform has seemingly become an important part of the agenda. It is good that attitudes of tolerating the presence of illegal immigrants rather than wanting them deported have overtaken the majority. A higher percentage of Americans also favor more immigration rather than less, which is also a happy development. Yet I fear that the...
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The Independent Institute is delighted to announce the publication of the 25th Anniversary Edition of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, by Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs. First published in 1987, this classic work introduced to the reading public the notion that national crises—the Great Depression, the two...
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An excellent movie released six years ago, “Amazing Grace,” depicted the life of William Wilberforce and his ultimately successful efforts to abolish, first, the British Slave Trade in 1806, and then slavery throughout the English empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. He did so entirely peacefully, through the British parliamentary system. It...
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