Articles

When children sit on Santa’s knee asking for gifts, it’s cute. When adults sit on Uncle Sam’s knee asking for handouts, it’s immoral. Although I often disagree with former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, his point about the difference between Santa and government is brilliant: Christmas is the time when kids…

Biotechnology is on the verge of revolutionizing medicine by enabling doctors to tailor therapies to the individual patient’s genetic makeup. But, as George Gilder explains: Obscuring the huge opportunity of new knowledge in pharma . . . is the obsolete apparat of government power. . . . [I]n the face…

Many conservatives and “liberals” are deeply confused about the meaning of rights and tolerance, as recent controversies—including the one over Duck Dynasty—make clear. So now is a good time to clarify and distinguish these ideas. What Are Rights? A “right” is a moral principle defining an individual’s proper “freedom of…

Thomas Edison once said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Kelvin Doe, a teen in Sierra Leone, spent the better part of his youth digging through trash bins in search of electronics parts. Finding the junk was relatively easy. Figuring out how to build…

The A&E cable network recently suspended Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson for his ignorant tirade on the alleged sinfulness of homosexuality: It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man's anus. That's just me. I'm just thinking: There's more there! She's got more to…

Usually I don’t comment on the slime published by Salon, as its writers’ idea of journalism often is to publish the most audacious lies they can imagine and hope they can get away with it. But I’ll make an exception regarding a recent pack of lies Salon published about Ayn…

Two hundred forty years ago today, December 16, 1773, to protest a tea tax that implied unlimited power on the part of Britain to tax the colonies, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded British ships and dumped 340 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. This protest was the first…

After barbarians destroyed the towering, 110-story World Trade Center towers on 9/11, some people wondered whether Americans would continue to regard outstandingly tall buildings as practical and worth the newly-realized risk. American developers are putting that wonder to rest, with a burgeoning new era of skyscrapers in New York City.…

Whatever Nelson Mandela’s substantial flaws—among other things, he was a socialist who befriended dictators—he played an important role in overturning South Africa’s horrifically unjust apartheid system. The History Channel succinctly summarizes the nature of apartheid, which remained in effect until 1994: By 1950, the government had banned marriages between whites…

The so-called “progressive” income tax is designed to tax “the rich” more—and that’s what it’s doing. CNBC reports: Buried inside a Congressional Budget Office [CBO] report this week was this nugget: when it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent…

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) drove the company that produced Buckyballs—small magnets sold to adults as toys—out of business, then proceeded to target the company’s former CEO (Craig Zucker) personally for the costs of the CPSC-mandated recall. Zucker has heroically fought back, suing the CPSC. But Zucker is not…

Dear Friend of TOS, I’m delighted to announce that in response to TOS’s end-of-year fundraising appeal, I just received the following letter from our generous supporters Chris and Lydia Ash, which I share with their permission: Mr. Biddle, The Objective Standard is deeply valuable to my wife and me. The…

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that Texas energy business produced 2.7 million barrels of oil in September—the highest volume since the EIA began tracking the data. Economist Mark Perry notes that “oil output has doubled in only 29 months” there; this is due mainly to advances in horizontal drilling…

I’m often asked why I make such a big deal about the libertarian MO of ignoring or denying the philosophic foundations of liberty. I give my general reasons in “Libertarianism vs. Radical Capitalism,” in which I provide several examples showing that the attempt to defend a free society apart from…