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Although many people take polyethylene for granted, almost everyone regularly uses myriad products made partly or entirely from it, including modern airplanes, trash bags, food storage containers, lightweight vehicles, stretch films, hard hats, detergent bottles, piping for natural gas and water, insulation for electrical wires, medical supplies, the list goes on and on.

Minimum wage laws are immoral because, like all government price controls, they violate the moral rights of individuals to act on their own judgment for their own purposes. In order to live and flourish, people need to think rationally, make judgments about what is and is not best for their lives, and act accordingly.

Some things are seemingly so mundane, and we use them so routinely, that we scarcely notice how important they are to our lives. Take, for example, common kitchen supplies. Pause for a moment to consider how businesses developed four essential products—and how important those products are to our daily food preparation.

Oil producers in the "Bakken shale formation in western North Dakota and eastern Montana have produced 1 billion barrels of crude [oil]" as of the first quarter of 2014, reports the Associated Press. "North Dakota has generated 852 million barrels of Bakken crude, and Montana has produced about 151 million barrels."

Those of us who are not doctors, but who love our lives and our health, should not stand idly by as politicians and bureaucrats shackle the doctors on whom our lives and health may well depend. We should stand with those doctors who, like Craviotto, demand liberty to practice medicine in accordance with their own judgment.

Rather than humbly seek God’s guidance through prayer, we should proudly uphold the value of reason as our only means of achieving rational guidance in politics or any other area of life. And we should demand that our political leaders go, not by faith, feelings, or popular opinion, but by rational, rights-respecting principles.

Whereas in the United States owners of resources have a strong incentive to contract with frackers—development of Eagle Ford shale in Texas generated some $2.4 billion in leases in 2010 alone—European politicians and bureaucrats, who control the resources in question there, have little to no incentive (and likely negative incentive) to enable fracking.

What if, when you looked at a piece of cheese (for example), you saw not only the cheese’s shape, color, texture, and the like, but also its chemical composition? Thanks to portable near-infrared spectroscopes now under development, you may soon be able to scan cheese or virtually any other object to learn facts about its chemical makeup.

The widely publicized racist rant of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is a disturbing reminder that some people continue to hold racist sentiments. But the greater and deeper harms to blacks today are to be found not in such racist rants, but in rights-violating government policies.

The solution consistent with individual rights is neither to force students to pledge allegiance to a nation “under God” nor to forbid them to do so. Rather, the solution is to get government out of education altogether and leave private schools to establish their own policies on such matters.

Adults have a moral right to spend their money as they see fit, and gambling companies have a moral right to offer their services as they see fit. So long as those gambling or offering gambling services do not violate rights, government has no moral right to interfere.

Tonight Robert Begley will join Andrew Bernstein and Arshak Benlian on their Blog Talk Radio show, Objectively Speaking. They'll discuss the Celebrate the Constitution Summit a conference scheduled for September. The show airs live from 8 to 9 pm Eastern, and the call-in number is 347-855-8824. Tune in, call in, tell your friends!

Due to government restrictions, UK producers have drilled only an averaged of 19 onshore wells per year over the last century. In stark contrast, because the U.S. government substantially protects the rights of private owners to subsurface oil and gas, energy producers here drill and frack thousands of wells annually.

SpaceX has successfully tested a soft landing of its Falcon9 rocket booster. Not only does such technology promise to vastly increase the launching of technologies and supplies into orbit, it promises to play a pivotal role in eventually transporting people to other planets, starting with Mars.

Inequality of resources per se is neither good nor bad. When government protects people’s rights and some people earn more wealth than others do by their own productive effort, the outcome is just. When government (or a criminal) violates people’s rights, the outcome (not to mention the act) is unjust—whether the result is more inequality or less.