The public memory of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement has been shaped by iconic images of state-licensed violence – peaceful protesters being beaten and otherwise abused by police for exercising the right to seek redress of grievances. The civil rights movement began as an effort to remove government impediments to individual liberty. By 1964 it had become a concerted effort to subject all private functions to government scrutiny and regimentation.
With the start of baseball season, fans will once again be exhorted to stand up and glorify the troops. Among those fans will be teenagers who will be proudly singing some variation of "I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free."
But neither American teenagers nor any other American is able to reconcile the freedom he is so proud of with the fact that the federal government forces every man to register for the draft when he reaches the age of 18.
To learn more about the "Government on Trial" project, visit here.
---- THE FIVE QUESTIONS ----
1) Is there any means by which any number of individuals can delegate to someone else the moral right to do something which none of the individuals have the moral right to do themselv... (more)
It is truly impossible to overstate the enormity of the welfare-state revolution that occurred in 20th-century America.
Consider that for more than 100 years -- from the inception of the Republic until the 20th century -- the American people lived under the most unusual and remarkable governmental system in history.
No, I'm not suggesting that it was a libertarian paradise by any means, especially when we throw slavery into the mix and such lesser things as governme... (more)
Although many states have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes, some states have decriminalized the possession of certain amounts of marijuana, and four states (Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, bipartisan support for the drug war throughout the United States continues unabated and unquestioned.
Why?
Why do so many Americans think that the property of other Americans should be confiscated, and ... (more)
The governor of Indiana last week signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, modeled on similar federal legislation. The Indiana statute states that a person’s religious beliefs may not be “substantially burden[ed]” by anti-discrimination statutes. In other words, if anti-discrimination laws could be construed as forcing a person to violate his own religious conscie... (more)
Recent investigations by the Associated Press into the practices of Tennessee prosecutors during plea-deal negotiations have alerted Americans to one of their government’s most gruesome and supposedly forbidden traditions: forced prisoner sterilization.
The new religious freedom controversy in Indiana reminds us that discrimination and exclusion are foundational aspects of private property. Without the right to exclude, a right to private property does not exist, since forced inclusion implies coerced action and accommodation under the threat of violence from the regulating state agency in question. Th... (more)
President Obama thinks that forcing us to vote might be a good idea. That he could favor punishing people for not voting -- which means taking their money by force and imprisoning or even shooting them if they resist -- is unsurprising. The essence of government is violence -- aggressive, not defensive, force. Government is not usually described in such unrefined terms, ... (more)
Silicon Valley executive Ellen Pao is licking her wounds after a jury ruled against her last week in her gender-discrimination suit against former employer Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, & Byers. Pao had accused the firm of not promoting her because she's a woman. The jury ruled against her by finding, as a factual determination, that she was not the victim of gender discrimination.
But the obvious question arises: Why should such a case even have to reach a jury to determine the fac... (more)
Andrew Cockburn has written a must-read book. The title is Kill Chain: The Rise Of The High-Tech Assassins. The title could just as well be: How the US Government and US Military Became Murder, Inc.
The US military no longer does war. It does assassinations, usually of the wrong people. The main victims of the US assassination policy are women, children, village elders, weddings, funerals, and occasionally US soldiers mistaken for Taliban by US surveillance operating with the visu... (more)
A murder case in Italy stands to expose the U.S. government's hypocritical stand on extradition, the legal process by which one country forcibly turns over a person within its jurisdiction to another country to stand trial for a criminal offense committed in the latter country.
Let's assume that John Doe, a citizen of Country A, is accused of murdering a person in Country B when he was traveling there. If there is no extradition treaty between the two nations, Country A has no leg... (more)
Are the Boy Scouts still an institution worthy of involvement in the development of young boys? Do they still teach the foundational values of individual responsibility and self-reliance?
Texas Blogger, Kent McManigal recently encountered some modern day Boy Scouts while out camping. After talking to some of these Scouts, he relates his disappointment at how few useful skills these Scouts had been taught. He offers an alternative organization to be formed- The “Browncoat S... (more)
“The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment,” writes Henry Farrell in Aeon magazine, “but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings.”
Ross Ulbricht was recently convicted on seven charges related to being “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), the mastermind behind Silk Road. The charges in h... (more)
Although she is no longer first lady, a U.S. senator from New York, or Secretary of State, and has not officially announced her candidacy to be the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton can't seem to stay out of the news. Conservatives love to hate Hillary almost as much as they love to hate Obama.
And rightly so.
Most lately it has come out that she used a private server for all of her e-mails when she was President Obama's secretary of state from 2009 ... (more)
Ted Cruz thought he had a captive audience when he spoke at the campus of Liberty University. Ten thousand students sat there attentively, all required to attend as part of the discipline of campus life.
Floating above the crowd, in a way that no one could see, was a different world of information. Students were using Yik Yak to make fun of the guy, mocking his every sentence. Some smart cookie among the media picked up on it and reported it. It's politics so the revelation beca... (more)
Ninety years ago this month, on March 3, 1925, Congress authorized the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission, and thus began the effort to take a perfectly good mountain and ruin it with the faces of a bunch of politicians.
The idea was conceived as nothing more than a tourism gimmick. That is, it was supposed to draw tourists to South Dakota. And it has certainly accomplished this goal. Countless tourists stream into the Black Hills every year to shell out ten bucks or so (... (more)
How big is government in the United States? The answer depends on the concept used to define its size. Although many such concepts are available, and several are used from time to time, by far the most common measure, especially in studies by economists, is total government spending (G) as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP).
Using official data available at the online repository maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and data available online for... (more)
Without much fanfare, this month Microsoft announced that it is phasing out its notorious Internet browser called Internet Explorer. In all the news stories about this, the main focus has been on how it has been outcompeted by Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, among many other browsers on the market. In addition, mobile applications are making gigantic gains over web browsing in general.
Indeed that is true.
On the platforms I've managed, I watched as IE went from 95% ... (more)
When most people think of destructive government wars, images of drone strike wreckage and murdered civilians come to mind.
But while organized, physical violence is a repulsive form of oppression, the state employs a variety of tactics to wage war on its own citizens. They are more subtle than batons and guns but far more effective than violence alone. They seek to conquer not bodies, but minds.
1) Over-Medication and the Drug War - Whether out of rabid gr... (more)
