People don’t like seeing their gods blasphemed, and the backlash against Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem has revealed the completely religious nature of American patriotism. Tomi Lahren, whose views on racial matters are about what you’d expect from a “conservative commentator” on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, has been on a nonstop outrage…

With the passing of “Labor Day” earlier this month it’s useful to reflect upon its origins and the state of the labor movement as it stands today. First celebrated on Sept. 5, 1882 in New York City by members of the Central Labor Union, a branch of the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor…

Every day I despair of the British Left, and hearing them on the issue of housing is no exception. On the one hand, they should be praised for being the only ones to draw serious attention to the very real problem of rising rents and urban displacement. On the other hand, however, there are serious…

It’s common among centrists to describe themselves — in contrast to the “far Left” and “far Right” — as the “rational adults” who can compromise and get things done. The “rational adult” trope usually appears in conjunction with “Horseshoe Theory,” according to which wisdom and reasonableness inhere in the political center and deviation from the…

Every prohibition, no matter how reasonable, has its bootleggers and every state, no matter how authoritarian, is unable to truly enforce a total ban on anything. So when a father in Berlin discovered swastikas painted on a children’s playground, a symbol that is actually illegal according to German law, he realized it was more effective…

If there’s one common theme that unites the economic Right — conservatives, right-libertarians and disciples of Ayn Rand — it’s that looting is bad and extremely prevalent. And they’re all pretty much agreed on who the looters are, besides. The framing has been pretty much the same going back at least to that (possibly Snopesbait)…

At Reason, Nick Gillespie (“How to Build a Better Epi-Pen — or Something Totally Different That’s Much Better,” Sept. 4) argues — correctly — that Mylan’s EpiPen price-gouging is enabled by government regulations. He cites fellow Reason writer Scott Shackelford’s earlier article (“Want to Reduce the Price of Epipens? Approve Some Competition!” Aug. 25) showing…

“Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them.” F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Responsibility and Freedom What does it mean for speech to be free?…

If you frequent mainstream right-libertarian publications on anything like a regular basis, you’ve probably seen more than one of those breathless articles about how capitalism is making the ordinary poor person richer than a medieval king. For example Calvin Beisner: “No matter how rich you might have been” 150 years ago, “You could not have…

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has refused to stand during the playing of The Star Spangled Banner, traditionally played before most football games. Like Gabby Douglas’ “refusal” to put her hand over her heart during the playing of the United States’ national anthem at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio last month, Kaepernick’s actions…

Formed from an ideological split between members of the First International, the Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores (AIT), more commonly known to the English speaking world as the International Workers’ Association (IWA) was founded in December of 1922. The First International was an organization aimed at uniting left-wing socialist, communist, and anarchist labor unions and…

As this article is being written, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe are preparing to challenge Dakota Access, LLC and the U.S. Army Corps in court over environmental concerns and property rights disputes. On July 26, 2016 the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe discovered that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers…

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently filed a lawsuit challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) on constitutonal grounds. According to the suit, that section — which criminalizes not only the circumvention of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but criminalizes the sharing of information about how to do it — is a violation of…

The only function of “intellectual property” is to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance — to take goods that, thanks to the advance of human knowledge, should naturally be getting cheaper, and make them artificially expensive. This is nowhere more evident than in the war corporations are fighting against their own customers’ right to…

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick reports (“Photographer Learns to Embrace the Public Domain — And is Better Off For It,” Aug. 5) that that Swiss photographer Samuel Zeller has discovered the benefits — to his livelihood! — of putting his work in the public domain. He’s put a lot of his work into the public domain…

(TW: Brief discussion of suicide) The Washington Post reports that the state of Texas has begun its court case against the federal government for setting guidelines about treatment of transgender students. The Department of Education has stated that because Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex for institutions that receive federal funding, that…

‘Women still suffer gender pension gap’ is the title of the article published by the Financial Times (whose subtitle is that “In developed and developing countries, the risk of old age poverty falls disproportionately on females”). This is an unsurprising finding when we consider that the gender pay gap largely persists more broadly and so…

Just this past May, Elsevier — the most notorious of the price-gouging proprietary academic publishing crime families — acquired the open-access academic repository SSRN. That’s right — a publisher that charges $30 to access 30-year-old papers is closing off free legal alternatives while simultaneously whining about sharing sites like Sci-Hub. Meanwhile, a Science magazine survey…

The Independent recently reported that the Michaela Community School (MCS) in Wembley, London, is being accused of giving its students detention if their parents are unable to make payments for their child’s lunches. As punishment the school enforces a “lunch isolation” where a child is given fruit and a sandwich instead of a hot meal…

(Content Warning: Discussion of suicide and suicide attempt) The ACLU reports that due to Chelsea Manning’s attempted suicide on July 5th in the Fort Leavenworth military prison she could face additional charges including “resisting the force cell move team;” “prohibited property;” and “conduct which threatens.” The punishment could include, “indefinite solitary confinement, reclassification into maximum…