Politicians want us to believe that our money naturally belongs to government and that letting us keep any of it is generosity on their part. But politicians don’t create wealth. They just seize it from the rest of us, or borrow it from lenders who expect them to seize it from us later.
Category: Libertarian Advocacy Journalism
The Russia-Blamers Think You’re Stupid
Americans never had rowdy disagreements with each other over race and religion until last year, and wouldn’t be having them now if not for those dirty, no-good Russian hackers who stole the 2016 presidential election from the second most hated candidate in history, on behalf of the most hated candidate in history, operating through subterfuge to achieve the outcome that some of us predicted months in advance, long before anyone mentioned Russian hackers.
Privacy and Politics: The Hypocrisy of the Surveillance Statists
So long as American politicians and bureaucrats continue to put the rest of us under a magnifying glass, they deserve no sympathy when they get caught trying to hide their own actions from public view.
Social Media: When Does “Actively Working With the Government” Become Censorship?
To put it differently, when does it cease to be merely “you can’t talk like that in my living room” (exercise of legitimate property rights) and start becoming “you can’t talk like that, period” (censorship)?
Jamie Dimon is Right to Fear Cryptocurrency
When JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a “fraud,” what ensued looked a lot like a “poop and scoop” con: The practice of driving down a thing’s price by saying bad things about it, then buying up a bunch of it before the price bounces back.
Digital Rights Management is the ENEmy of Internet Freedom
The purpose of Digital Rights Management is to allow creators to control the use of, and prevent the copying of, “intellectual property” — in the form of copyrighted informational works or proprietary hardware creations — after its original sale. The 30-odd year history of DRM is one of consumer dissatisfaction and sequential failure.
Utah Case Highlights Need for Separation of Medicine and Law Enforcement
In July, Salt Lake City detective Jeff Payne violently abducted Alex Wubbels, a nurse at University of Utah Hospital. Most accounts don’t put it that way — they use the word “arrested” instead — but Wubbels was released without charges because Payne’s actions were clearly an extra-legal physical power play by a police officer who was angry at not getting his way.
Preparedness versus “Price-Gouging”: Don’t Hold Out for a Hero
Living as I do in another hurricane-prone area (Florida) where I got a small taste of the phenomenon from Hermine last year, and having seen my share of tornadoes, blizzards, floods, earthquakes, etc. in other places, it seems to me that hoping for such heroics should be the last rather than the first resort.
Hurricane Harvey: About That Wall…
It may be weeks before the storms end, the waters recede, and basic utilities are restored. But this, too, shall pass — and then begins the rebuilding. Who’s going to do that rebuilding?
WikiLeaks: Hostile is as Hostile Does
When the US Senate Intelligence Committee declares WikiLeaks “hostile,” the obvious question is “hostile to whom?” WikiLeaks is allied with the American people, while the US intelligence community — and, for the moment at least, the US Senate Intelligence Committee — is our enemy.