To various leftist American pundits, France’s recent election of socialist François Hollande to the presidency proves the ineffectiveness of Europe’s alleged “austerity” measures. For example, after considering Hollande’s election and the upheavals in Greece, Time's Bryan Walsh concludes: Both are reactions to the increasingly discredited—or at the very least disliked—austerity…

“President Obama plans to give Congress a ‘To Do List’ today,” USA Today reports. But that’s not how American government is supposed to work. On the contrary, Congress, the legislative branch of government, is supposed to give the “to do lists” to the president, head of the executive branch. (The…

Noteworthy news and views from the week ending May 5, 2012 The Real Life of Julia Barack Obama’s campaign recently launched a web page titled, “The Life of Julia.” We are supposed to “look at how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime.” David Harsanyi sensibly asks, “Who…

Communist regimes enslaved, tortured, and slaughtered hundreds of millions of people in the last century, and to this day communists in North Korea, China, and elsewhere tyrannize citizens. To cite but a couple of examples from recent headlines, North Korean communists continue to murder even children in brutal concentration camps,…

MSNBC recently featured a favorable discussion of the ideas of Karl Marx in the context of a proposed May Day “general strike.” To put this in context: MSNBC would never do the same with respect to the ideas of Adolf Hitler, yet Marxists slaughtered many millions more people than the…

It is outrageous that here in America the police can seize a person’s property, sell it, and keep the proceeds—all without so much as charging the victim with a crime, much less obtaining a criminal conviction. Under such a system, the police are violators rather than protectors of property rights.…

Timothy Sandefur, an attorney with the pro-liberty Pacific Legal Foundation, argues on his personal blog that the next president’s ability to select judges is not sufficient reason to support Mitt Romney: Romney is turning for advice on the judiciary [to] none other than Robert Bork, an intellectually dishonest anti-moral authoritarian…

Noteworthy news and views from the week ending April 28, 2012 Washington’s Spending Problem The Institute for Humane Studies has published a series of short videos on free-market economics (and other subjects) at LearnLiberty.org. The latest is titled, “Does Government Have a Revenue or Spending Problem?” The narrator of the…

Al Armendariz, a regional administrator of the EPA, described his “philosophy of enforcement” as follows: It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would…

Where has all the innovation gone? Although Facebook now has nearly a billion users, and most of us now have pocket computers with instant access to a world of information, in the last few decades innovation has, in significant ways, slowed to a crawl. In a recent talk, “On Getting…

Yesterday the environmentalists “celebrated” Earth Day, a day devoted to curbing human production and consumption, which means curbing human life. Those of us who love our lives, on the other hand, celebrate using the Earth to live and prosper, for we as humans live fundamentally by using our rational minds…

Marxism is “good in theory but not in practice,” many claim. Or, it was “misapplied” by the murderous regimes that slaughtered some 100 million people, others say. Neither claim is correct, argues historian C. Bradley Thompson in a recent talk delivered at the Foundation for Economic Education. Rather, Thompson shows,…

Noteworthy news and views from the week ending April 21, 2011 The Antritrust Assault on Apple Discussing the government’s antitrust action against Apple, an attorney for the company said, “We believe that this is not an appropriate case against us and we would like to validate that.” Calling the government’s…

How many executive agencies does it take to “regulate” hydraulic fracturing, the revolutionary process of harvesting natural gas (as well as oil) largely responsible for saving America’s economy? According to Barack Obama’s new executive order, it takes fourteen—plus a potentially unlimited number of “such other agencies or offices as the…

I will never forget a lesson I learned years ago interning in Washington, DC as a young, naive student. One of my jobs was to evaluate the transportation budget. I was shocked to discover that the Senators on the committee managed to add a variety of spending projects for their…