The gun control debate in the United States is often couched in somewhat parochial terms, with one side invoking, for example, the nation’s unique Second Amendment guarantees and the other citing America’s disturbing problems with gun violence. Yet for this issue (and many others), it’s often enlightening to look at the experiences of other...
Read More »

France’s National Front, the far-right organization that has become a symbol of the xenophobic, Euroskeptic, nationalist reaction against the prevailing problems in Europe, has sent ripples across the world by topping the latest polls and winning a significant by-election. Marine Le Pen, its leader, is busy giving birth to a continent-wide movement of like-minded...
Read More »

Generation Opportunity has just released two videos, one featuring a woman and one a man, attacking the looming disaster of Obamacare (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), which is scheduled to go into effect on October 1st. The ads feature “Creepy Uncle Sam,” performing gynecological and prostate exams on young adults. The ads encourage...
Read More »

Late last month a heavily armed SWAT team consisting of police, special agents, and social workers, stormed the home of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich. This was the culmination of a four-year saga trying to evade German authorities. No, the Wunderliches were not cooking up a dastardly terrorist plot or smoking pot. Their high crime...
Read More »

In his justly famous 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph A. Schumpeter described the dynamics of a market economy as a process of “creative destruction.” In his view, innovation—“the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates”—drives this...
Read More »

I have pretty low expectations for Superman movies, so I was both impressed and pleasantly surprised to find myself entertained as well as see an important pro-liberty theme embedded in the movie Man of Steel. Leaving aside problems of excessively long special effects and a few plot holes, the 2013 version of the Superman...
Read More »

It seems simple enough. Publicly available evidence shows two young men implicated in the horrific massacre in Boston this Monday, the shooting of the officer at MIT, crimes against others, and violent resistance against the police. One brother is dead and the other on the lam. And so the police have locked down Boston,...
Read More »

As a rule, libertarians incline toward wishful thinking. They constantly pluck little events, statements, and movies from the flow of life and cry out, “Eureka! Libertarianism is on the march!” With some of my friends, this tendency is so marked that I have become amused by its recurrent expression—well, there he goes again! Some...
Read More »

Finally, some sanity, and from a somewhat unexpected source. The ACLU is concerned about the civil liberties implications of the new Harry Reid Senate bill to establish so-called “universal background checks” for firearms purchases. The organization has tended toward silence on gun rights, but at least now it recognizes aspects of the problem with...
Read More »

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...
Read More »