Politics & Rights

America is becoming a society of “mutual plunder among citizens,” as described by Frédéric Bastiat, and, if we don’t change course, things will get much worse. Consider a recent editorial from Investors Business Daily (based on a news report from CNSNews.com): At the end of 2011, the last year for…

The Daily Caller describes a recent outrage caused by the government’s war on drugs: “On the night of June 27th, Los Angeles County deputies raided the home of Eugene Mallory and Tonya Pate,” an elderly couple. Police claimed they smelled chemicals used to produce methamphetamine, but they found no meth…

New Jersey recently became the fourteenth state to legalize gay marriage, when Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson overturned the state’s ban on such contracts. Governor Chris Christie, who previously vetoed a bill to legalize gay marriage in New Jersey, appealed Jacobson’s ruling to the state Supreme Court. But when the…

Recently the federal debt raced past $17 trillion. To put that in perspective, the U.S. population is currently around 316,941,000, so the debt amounts to nearly $54,000 per person. Where is the government doing with that money? Government spends over half the federal budget on direct wealth-transfer programs: Medicare, Medicaid,…

American businessman Sheldon Adelson (CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, whom Bloomberg lists at the 14th richest person in the world), says the United States should drop a nuclear bomb in the Iranian desert—and then threaten to drop a second in the center of Tehran—in order to end Iran’s efforts…

In response to a reporter's questions during his October 8 news conference, Barack Obama offered the following argument in favor of raising the debt ceiling: [I]magine, in your private life, if you decided that I'm not going to pay my mortgage for a month or two. First of all, you're…

A recent report by Denver’s ABC affiliate illustrates one of the many problems resulting from bureaucrats violating rights by throttling construction: Tens of millions of dollars in private sector construction projects are bottlenecked because the City and County of Denver isn't approving permits fast enough to meet the demand, a…

Molly Ball at the Atlantic reveals the sad truth about the now-lifted government “shutdown” (sad at least for advocates of rights-respecting government): Obamacare will not be repealed. Obamacare will not be defunded. Obamacare will not be delayed. The individual mandate will not be delayed. The medical-device tax will not be…

First the federal government shut down the production of Buckyballs—small magnets that can be arranged in interesting patterns and that were sold as toys to adults. Now the government is aiming to hold Craig Zucker, the CEO of the company that produced Buckyballs, personally liable for $57 million, the cost…

If you own a beer brewery in, say, New York, the federal government now forbids you to sell your new specialty beers to people living in Connecticut or New Jersey—or anywhere else in the country. That’s right, the federal government, via the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB),…