Governments, the Declaration of Independence declares, “deriv[e] their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,” and absent such consent for a particular government, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Which, as you may recall, America’s British colonists proceeded to do. By force.
Author: Thomas L. Knapp
Tom has worked in journalism — sometimes as an amateur, sometimes professionally — for more than 35 years and has been a full-time libertarian writer, editor, and publisher since 2000. He’s the former managing editor of the Henry Hazlitt Foundation, the publisher of Rational Review News Digest (2003-present), former media coordinator and senior news analyst at the Center for a Stateless Society (2009-2015) and also works at Antiwar.com. He lives in north central Florida.
“For the Children”: The Last Refuge of Anti-Encryption Scoundrels
End-to-end encryption — encryption built directly into apps and requiring little or no effort to invoke — brings the benefits of online privacy to everyday Internet users. The campaigns against it aren’t aimed at terrorists or child pornographers or child sex traffickers. They’re aimed at you.
Of Pockets, Legs, and Polarization
When it comes to political issues, Thomas Jefferson offered a useful standard: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Vladimir Putin Is Not the Neville Chamberlain the US/NATO is Looking For
For 45 years, the justification was to defend Germany from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. As Germany moved toward reunification, US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization wouldn’t expand so much as “one inch eastward” into the former Soviet sphere of influence it was created to contain.
COVID-19 and the End of Government Schooling’s Main Value Proposition
The value proposition government schooling offers is: “Sure, we do a fairly crappy job of teaching your kids to read, write, and do arithmetic … but hey, who turns down free daycare?”
We Do Need a Great Reset — and a Different Burden of Proof
In my view, the World Economic Forum isn’t just thinking in the wrong direction, it isn’t thinking big enough. It’s far too constrained in its goals, which revolve around bringing the world’s regimes into closer conformity with each other and with the United Nations on issues like taxes, regulations, and the bugbear du jour, climate change.
Collins Emails Spotlight Bureaucracy’s Attempted Subjugation of Science and Scientists
I supported the Great Barrington Declaration — and hundreds of thousands died. Not because US policymakers implemented the Declaration’s recommendations, but either because of, or in spite of, US policymakers following the recommendations of Collins, Fauci, and others.
If You Want More of Something, Subsidize It
I’m agnostic on the relationship between population and climate change, but I can’t help notice a contradiction when prominent progressives who claim to believe that overpopulation is a problem simultaneously support paying Americans to have more kids.
No, President Biden, We’re Not Your “Customers”
Portraying government as a business and you as its “customer” ranks right up there with “the consent of the governed” on the list of fictions contrived to confer “legitimacy” on an institution that does its best to run every aspect of your life, at your expense, whether you consent or not.
Cryptocurrency and the Shocking Revelation That White Supremacists Like Money
“White supremacists embraced cryptocurrency early in its development, ” Michael Edison Hayden and Megan Squire report at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog, “and in some cases produced million-dollar profits through the technology, reshaping the racist right in radical ways.” I have no doubt the claim is true. What’s also true is a note several paragraphs into the piece: “Nothing is inherently criminal or extreme about it, and most of its users have no connections to the extreme far right. ”