Articles

Ralph Peters—retired Army officer, Fox News “Strategic Analyst,” and early supporter of President George W. Bush’s Mideast policies—has come to an important realization that all lovers of liberty should heed: Democracy doesn’t mean freedom. With the very best intentions, we got it wrong. By elevating the establishment of democracy above…

Ellie Rubenstein, an elementary school teacher, is so fed up with the bureaucratic nature of “public” education that she has taken to YouTube to condemn the system and announce her resignation. At age 45, Rubenstein left her job in advertising to pursue her lifelong dream of teaching. While raising two…

When Jimmy Rose performed part of his song “Coal Keeps the Lights On” on America’s Got Talent, he struck a chord with both the audience and the judges. Rose’s lyrics depict a coal miner whose hard work shows in his calloused hands and whose rewards shows in the “sundress on…

Despite George Zimmerman’s acquittal by a jury of all charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin—and despite the Fifth Amendment’s assurance that no person shall be “twice put in jeopardy” legally for the same offense—the Obama administration has decided to employ its political machinery to persecute Zimmerman. “Florida authorities…

The June 2013 BP Statistical Review of World Energy reported “that 2012 had the largest single-year increase in US oil production ever recorded.” Of all countries, the United States attained the “highest growth in production of both oil and natural gas,” an achievement made possible by horizontal drilling and hydraulic…

Looking for a platform to chastise House Republicans for excluding the federal food stamp program from its farm bill, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez recently visited the state's largest food bank, the Hillside chapter of the private Community FoodBank of New Jersey (CFBNJ), “to highlight his support for the Supplemental…

French president François Hollande recently stated, “As long as I am president, there will be no shale gas exploration in France. The debate on shale gas has gone on for too long." The debate is whether France, Europe's second largest energy consumer, will maintain its moratorium on oil and gas…

Today, July 20, is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the moon and his famous proclamation, “That’s one small step for a man. One giant leap for mankind.” The success of the Apollo space program required the dedicated effort of thousands of individuals, all of whom are to…

In this episode of Reason at Large, Craig Biddle discusses what the so-called poor owe the rich, focusing on several of the many things for which the poor should thank the rich, including the goods and services they produce, the jobs they make possible, the legitimate aspects of government they…

As part of a larger website migration underway, TOS has transferred its email lists from an old server to a new one at MailChimp. If you subscribe to our free TOS commentary & announcements list, you likely received a newly formatted email through that list last Monday. (If you subscribe…

A seventy-year-old southern Italian man has been fined 1,000 Euros (nearly $1,300) for the so-called crime of “scorn against the nation.” The first version of the law was introduced as part of the “crimes against the State’s character” in 1889 and was kept on the books after Mussolini’s fascist takeover.…

Earlier today, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed House Bill 2, banning most abortions after twenty weeks and severely regulating the state’s abortion clinics and certain birth-control drugs. For now, I want to leave aside the regulations the bill imposes both on abortion clinics (restrictions so severe that “only five of…

The Objective Standard aided and abetted lawbreaker Jonathan Hoenig for more than a year—but we are now in the clear. Hoenig, a.k.a. “Capitalist Pig,” has purchased a back-cover advertisement with The Standard since the summer of 2012 to promote his hedge fund business. But, as Peter Sterne reports for the…

In his Salon article “Ayn Rand Could Have Learned from the Arizona Firefighters,” Robert Reich presumes that the nineteen firefighters who lost their lives June 30 while battling a wildfire in Arizona chose their dangerous profession based on “something other than rational self-interest”: Like the first-responders to 9/11 and other…

In a July 8 episode of The 700 Club, Pat Robertson rejected civil rights, which, he conceded, underpinned the recent Supreme Court rulings concerning homosexual marriage. And for some reason now the Supreme Court has said homosexuality is now a constitutional right and homosexual marriage, this decision that was handed…