Politics & Rights

“America was not founded on God and religion. America was founded on reason,” said Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, at the 2012 Reason Rally in Washington, DC. He added: The Age of Reason . . . was the age when humanity was born again, not from original sin, but…

Apparently Justice Elena Kagan is oblivious to the obvious fact that taxes are coercive, in that they forcibly take wealth away from the owners of that wealth and give it to others. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court considered oral arguments regarding the Medicaid mandate that ObamaCare would impose on states.…

 Commenting on the Supreme Court session regarding Obamacare, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. wrote: And in arguing for restraint, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what was wrong with leaving as much discretion as possible “in the hands of the people who should be fixing this, not us.” It was nice…

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday pertaining to the ObamaCare insurance mandate. At issue is whether the federal government may force people to purchase health insurance. The arguments demonstrate that the mandate is a response to the problems created by other government controls of health care and insurance. Consider…

Ann McElhinney is a journalist and documentary film director and producer. Her films include Mine Your Own Business (2006), which takes on the environmentalist opposition to mining. This film incurred the wrath of 80 NGOs, including Greenpeace, which tried to stop its screening in the National Geographic auditorium in Washington…

At the behest of “fathers’ rights advocates,” New Jersey Assemblyman Gilbert Wilson (D) has “proposed a measure . . . that would require all newborns—and their parents—to undergo genetic testing to create a record should questions arise about whom the father or mother is.” A justifiably angry NJ Star-Ledger columnist,…

T-Mobile, other companies, and so-called “public-interest” groups, are calling for the government to block Verizon’s purchase of “spectrum from cable companies,” the Washington Times reports. The “justifications” for this call for government force are that (1) if Verizon were to make such a purchase, that would create “‘excessive concentration’ of…

The Supreme Court helped protect property rights yesterday by deciding unanimously that Mike and Chantell Sackett can legally challenge the EPA’s demand that they cease work on building their new home. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which represented the Sacketts, announced the victory. A Reason TV video summarizes the case.…

The Philippine government has announced that peace talks with the Islamist separatist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), is nearing a stalemate, as the MILF is demanding its own autonomous Islamic state within the Philippines. The problem here is not the stalemate, but the negotiations. The MILF is a…

To Americans, it is almost unimaginable that a country still exists where hundreds of thousands of people are slaves. Yet in the impoverished western African nation of Mauritania, slavery is widespread, CNN reports in an extraordinary set of articles. Americans rightly express outrage over such injustice. Slavery—aka involuntary servitude—violates the…