Imagine it’s the week of Christmas and you’re far away from home. There is no chance that you will see your family or your once familiar friends in time. You miss the taste of pizza and there’s likely no gifts waiting for you around the corner. You’ve been far away from home for a while….

At the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry (“Yes, America’s middle class has been disappearing… into higher income groups,” Dec. 17) justifies the shrinking middle class and growing economic inequality by citing the finding of a recent Pew Institute study that of the 11% shrinkage in the American middle class, 7% have gone to the top…

With its recent 9-0 vote, Seattle’s City Council decided to extend collective bargaining rights to Uber and Lyft drivers. The App-Based Drivers Association (ABDA) lobbied for the outcome in collaboration with a local Teamsters union. Reactions to the decision have been split along the usual, predictable lines. Lyft claimed in an official statement that the ordinance threatens…

Peace on Earth and goodwill to all — in a world of conflict, tis the season of peace. I write about the peaceful angels of our nature every holiday season. I hope to replace “conflict” with “love” soon. Another year over, and it was full of war. But we cannot expect the end of war…

The demagogic exaggeration of the “terrorist threat,” which was the centerpiece of the last Republican debates, is easily deflated with just a moment’s thought. What is the chance that any particular resident of the United States will happen to be in the same place as someone who intends to murder in the name of the…

Our “pale blue dot” has circled its star nineteen times since it lost the astronomer who gave us the perspective to see it that way — and that phrase. Carl Sagan is not usually remembered as a political prophet, except possibly in warning of the dangers of nuclear war and drug criminalization. But his inquiry questioned any nation’s “set of…

Seemingly John Stossel never sits down to write without the goal of further lowering the bar for qualifying as a libertarian. This time (“My Trump Problem,” Reason, Nov. 11), he’s managed to push the criterion to the all-time low of being somewhat less statist than Donald Trump. Stossel’s first problem with Trump allegedly centers on…

Over the weekend CNN breathlessly reported as “Breaking News” — it breathlessly reports everything as “Breaking News” — a new poll indicating that people are increasingly frightened about terrorism. The accompanying web story stated, “Terrorism has eclipsed the economy as voters’ top pick for the biggest issue facing America, a New York Times/CBS News poll…

It’s about time someone challenged the phrase radical Islamic terrorism. The most objectionable part is the word radical since it is now popularly associated with aggression — violence against innocents — as an acceptable means to politico-religious ends. But nothing about the word radical implies approval of aggression or terrorism. Rather, the word signifies an approach that goes to the…

I usually don’t dip my feet into the perilous waters of the gun-control debate for several reasons: I’m not a gun-owner, guns have never interested me as either a pastime or culturally, and having the capacity to end people’s lives easily unnerves me. Be this as it may, I still strongly oppose gun control and Obama’s…

At Progressive Review (“Two Types of Terrorism,” Dec. 7), Sam Smith breaks terrorism down into two types: “That which uses guns and bombs and that which uses words to terrify the public into going along with whatever those in power want.” But the two aren’t unrelated, as the respective domestic reactions to the Paris bombings…

What do Barack Obama and Donald Trump have in common? Among other things, they have — or pretend to have — no clue why some Muslims hate us. Trump says (I almost typed believes, but I’m not sure anyone, including Trump, knows what he believes) Muslims should be barred from the United States until “until…

In a video produced by the Future of Freedom Foundation (“The Libertarian Angle: Do Libertarians Really Hate the Poor?“), Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling obviously intend a smashing, unanswerable rejoinder to the left-wing stereotype of right-libertarians as “pot-smoking Republicans” who hate the poor. Sadly, it only reaffirms that stereotype. It’s exactly what left-wing critics of libertarianism…

Controversy and the Australian second‑wave feminist Germaine Greer have unfailingly gone hand-in-hand over these last few decades, with much of this attributable to her vocal, yet divisive, opinions about transgender people (mainly trans women in particular). The latest chapter in Greer’s fraught dealings with the transgender community concerned a recent invitation by Cardiff University for…

Considering that what liberty we continue to enjoy in the West is a product in large part of competing legal institutions operating within overlapping jurisdictions hundreds of years ago, it’s curious that so many libertarians still believe such an order — an essential feature of free-market, or natural-law, anarchism — would be inimical to liberty. Why wouldn’t…

According to Reuters, as of last Sunday, the NSA has shut down their invasive phone surveillance program. Under the program, the NSA collected callers’ so-called metadata.  Under the system, information such as what numbers people called and when they called were gathered and retained in a government database. This program’s closing is a positive step…

While Franklin Roosevelt may not have said that Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza “may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” he probably thought it — just as other presidents have had similar thoughts about myriad brutal rulers. So if the U.S. government has forced the American people to support useful dictators, why is…

A recent Pew Research Survey found 40% of Americans from ages 18 to 34 support the notion that the government should limit speech that is offensive to minorities. Older Americans were less favorable to the idea, while Democratic voters were twice as likely to support the idea than Republicans. As a member of the American Left’s libertarian…

Canada recently announced plans to take in 25,000 Syrian refugees as soon as possible. However, not all refugees will be considered. Adult males without families will be excluded. Canada has added a stipulation permitting single male refugees to enter Canada if they are gay. Gay men and all other sexual and gender minorities face a…

From the start, opponents of the American empire warned that the government could not violate the rights of foreigners without eventually violating the rights of Americans. An excellent example is William Graham Sumner’s post-Spanish-American War classic The Conquest of the United States by Spain. The anti-imperialists were spot-on, and the evidence for their case keeps…