I recently watched a short presentation by Mark Hendrickson from Grove City College about the free market and Walmart. In the presentation Hendrickson covers in short, but informative detail, how free market mechanisms work. Firms that offer better prices in the market draw away customers from other firms, and the end result is that new…

Easily the most persistent question that arises when we endure another shooting such as the recent one at LAX in which a TSA agent was killed and others injured is “Why?” It appears that the shooter, 23-year-old Paul Anthony Ciancia, had one thing in mind: Killing TSA agents. He did not appear to want to…

A new book (Double Down: Game Change 2012, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann) claims that  US president Barack Obama told his aides during his last election that he’s “really good at killing people.” He’s right. For example, last Friday a drone strike targeting Hakimullah Mehsud of the Tehreek-e- Taliban Pakistan (TTP) reportedly ended his…

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “propaganda of the deed” — individual acts of violence intended to inspire revolution — became the signature anarchist activity. Among the prominent casualties were French president Sadi Carnot, American president William McKinley and Italian King Umberto I. Although propaganda of the deed has faded into history as…

I just read that the parents of an autistic high school student arrested in a drug sting operation in Temecula, California last December have filed suit against the school district. The parents were “initially happy their son had made his first and only friend last year at school,” but became suspicious when his “school friend”…

In Washington, D.C., Fully Informed Jury Association activist James Babb has placed informative billboards at Metro stations near the courts. These billboards tell passersby about jury nullification, the ancient right of jurors to judge both the facts and the law. The doctrine has a long and venerable history; the right of juries to ignore the law…

One of the first things I learned in my health care career is that pain is an inherently subjective experience. Different people experience different levels of pain in different situations, and everyone has their own idiosyncratic problem areas — one can’t bear dental pain while another finds back injuries unbearable. Because of this fact, backed…

It’s been the thing lately, among certain establishment liberals, to dismiss libertarians as “Koch-funded shills.” We’ve heard a lot of it from Mark Ames and Yasha Levine at NSFWCorp, for example. This is stupid, first of all, because it’s historically illiterate. Free market libertarianism has its origins in the classical liberalism of two hundred years…

The strongest argument in favor of the fiction of “intellectual property” is consequential rather than moral: Creators of good things — novels, songs, drugs, what have you — we are told, will essentially go on strike if government doesn’t guarantee their profits by vesting them with monopoly “rights” to ideas. Instead of writing that next…

As we learn more and more details regarding government spying, it seems more and more foolhardy to trust our security to third party businesses. The state requires information on its subjects to be effective. From the first census in Egypt more than 5000 years ago, states have sought personal information on their citizens, especially in…

It happens so often these days that it almost passes without notice: A young defendant, accused of some awful crime, is “charged as an adult.” Such is the case of 14-year-old Philip Chism of Andover, Massachusetts. The Danvers High School student, prosecutors allege, followed 24-year-old math teacher Colleen Ritzer into a bathroom, punched her in…

On Tuesday in Santa Rosa, California, two of that city’s “finest” cowered behind a car door and gunned down a thirteen-year-old boy carrying a toy rifle. This little boy, Andy Lopez Cruz, was walking down the street with a fake plastic rifle when the two “heroes” boldly got out of their police cruiser, hid behind the…

It’s impossible to make this stuff up, folks. Salon.com columnist Tom Watson, in an article on the upcoming “Stop Watching Us” rally in Washington, D.C., has excoriated all of his progressive friends for supporting something that libertarians — surprise! — also support. He writes, “Some of the biggest names in civil liberties and digital freedom…

Frankly, I have a hard time understanding what goes on in the heads of “progressives.” On the one hand, they constantly complain — and rightfully so — about the power of big business and corporate domination of our society and economy. But on the other, their rhetoric is full of nostalgia for the government policies…

Thomas Nestel, the Philadelphia Transit Authority police chief, is aghast over the refusal of bystanders to help a transit cop — Sam Wellington — being beaten up by one of their fellow citizens that he’d been trying to arrest. “I was horrified. I was frightened for my cops.” Well, it’s hard not to sympathize with…

In 2011 I sat on a panel discussion at King’s Books in Tacoma, Washington, on the subject of the effect of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on soldiers and their families. My prepared remarks were a discussion of the impact of repeated deployments on the families I saw on the labor and delivery floor…

Jon Hochschartner’s article in Salon on Saturday argues that the classic video game “The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time” is a mess of classist, racist, and sexist tropes. He will get no argument from me on the sexism score — the entire series is focused on rescuing the princess, again and again. But on the…

Throughout the US government “shutdown,” Democratic politicians have compared their Republican rivals to “anarchists” and argued that the “shutdown” proves government necessary. A recent speech by US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on the Senate floor exemplifies this trend. Misconceptions run rampant in Senator Warren’s speech. She conflates cooperation and government, stating “In our democracy, government is…

The shooting on Capitol Hill of Miriam Carey, an unarmed woman who refused police commands to stop her car, was a familiar situation for any veteran of the Iraq War, with one significant difference — rather than moving through a progressive escalation of force while attempting to defuse the situation, Capitol Hill police officers went…

I’m hearing a lot of negativity — constructive negativity, but negativity nonetheless —  from my comrades on the libertarian left, concerning the US federal government’s “shutdown.” As the Center for a Stateless Society’s Kevin Carson notes with reference to “furloughed” government employees, “[S]ome of what government workers do — for example cops who enforce drug…