Politics & Rights

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Today, a Colorado court demanded that Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Bakeshop, bake wedding cakes for gay couples or face fines, the Associated Press reports. But Phillips—who disapproves of gay marriage and says he’ll close his shop rather than bake cakes for gay weddings—has a moral right to refuse to…

A recent exchange about gun statistics illustrates the failure of libertarianism to base political freedom on anything other than personal or cultural opinion. In a recent blog post, Bryan Caplan, a libertarian anarchist and an economist at George Mason University (GMU), discusses a recent study linking gun ownership to suicide…

Voters in several Colorado communities recently elected to ban or severely restrict hydraulic fracturing (fracking)—a process by which energy producers have vastly expanded production of natural gas and oil—in their areas. (Of course, these voters continue to power their homes and automobiles using energy produced by fracking.) An editorial in…