Politics & Rights

Senator Sherrod Brown (D) has called for breaking up America’s biggest banks. His Safe, Accountable, Fair & Efficient (SAFE) Banking Act would ostensibly “end ‘Too Big to Fail’ policies” while placing allegedly “sensible size limits on our nation’s large financial institutions.” Brown had previously teamed with Senator David Vitter (R)…

Mr. Natelson discusses state-driven amendments to restrain federal spending, the processes of proposing and passing or rejecting such amendments, the safeguards in place for preventing a “runaway convention” that might fundamentally alter the U.S. Constitution, and more.

Surveys various problems inherent in focusing on the non-essential characteristic of government’s size rather than on the truly essential characteristic of whether and to what extent government protects or violates individual rights.

Various opponents of abortion like to pretend that, if a woman has a right to seek an abortion, the law can do nothing to protect a fetus that a woman wishes to carry to term. But that pretense is nonsense. As Diana Hsieh and I have argued, an embryo or…

Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last night didn’t tell us much about the state of the union. It merely told us what we already knew about the state of Obama: that he wants to control the economy and “spread the wealth around.” True, in a few minor ways…

What are the essential principles that give rise to and support a free society? This is the most pressing question mankind faces today, and its answer is the least understood. In this speech, delivered at Hungry Minds Speaker Series in Denver, CO, Craig Biddle argues that a free society depends…

The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit to block Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $20 billion buyout of Mexican beer-maker Grupo Modelo, the maker of the Corona beer brand. The Wall Street Journal calls the Busch-Modelo agreement “the latest deal to fall prey to global antitrust regulators.” Antitrust laws grant government broad-based…

On January 18th, a federal court struck down the IRS’s onerous licensing rules for tax preparers thanks to the Institute for Justice and three gutsy independent tax preparers—Sabina Loving, John Gambino, and Elmer Kilian. The decision in the case, Loving v. IRS, enjoined the IRS from enforcing 2011 rules that…

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein argues that Barack Obama, like Franklin Roosevelt, supports “free enterprise, while also insisting on . . . fair opportunity and security for all.” Leave aside for now the obvious fact that programs such as FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act—which imposed nationwide controls on wages, prices,…

Forget the murderers, rapists, gangsters, kidnappers, child molesters, and slave traders. Some of Europe’s top bureaucrats and prosecutors are hot on the trail of . . . garlic smugglers. So why would people smuggle garlic, of all things? The BBC reports that, starting in 2001, the European Union imposed “a…