At this moment, governments have stockpiled at least 17,300 nuclear weapons, for leverage in disputes with other governments. Powerful men in suits calmly talk things over while memories of mushroom clouds and mass-murder stand in the back of the room like a silent muscleman. In the words of ethicist Germain Grisez, those who own these…

Hillary and Henry sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G-E-R! It says a lot about former secretary of state and presumed presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton that she’s a member of the Henry Kissinger Fan Club. Progressives who despised George W. Bush might want to examine any warm, fuzzy feelings they harbor for Clinton. She has made no…

So President Obama is going to defer deportation of five million people without government papers, mostly parents of children whom the government deems citizens or legal permanent residents. Under his executive order, most will get permission to work. Obama will also increase the number of “dreamers” — children brought here illegally by their parents and…

You may be familiar with Murray Rothbard’s article “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, beloved eminence grise at LewRockwell.com, takes things a step further and makes belief in human inequality the defining characteristic of right-libertarianism (“A Realistic Libertarianism,” Sept. 30). This isn’t just a hill he’s willing to die on, but a hill…

The “privatization” of local government functions under the state-appointed emergency manager in Detroit is lionized by a lot of right-leaning libertarians as an example of “free market reform.” But it’s a lot more accurate to treat it as flat-out looting — what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” The so-called “privatization” of government assets, as it’s…

Libertarians are individualists. But since individualist has many senses, that statement isn’t terribly informative. Does it mean that libertarians are social nonconformists on principle? Not at all. Some few libertarians may aspire to be, but most would see that as undesirable because it would obstruct their most important objectives. Lots of libertarian men have no…

Remember that stupid “We Are the 53%” campaign? Were you hoping you’d seen the last of it? Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s back. This time it’s being resurrected in an even more monstrous form by Stephan Kinsella — a libertarian attorney who, when not writing stuff like this, is actually one of the most…

I don’t know when this column will see print, but as I write it people all over the world are celebrating — with rightful enthusiasm — the fall of the Iron Curtain 25 years ago. During the Spanish-American War, William Graham Sumner gave a speech on “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” in…

Professional fools are an ingrained aspect of our image of the medieval royal court system. Fools, more commonly known as jesters, were permitted to be asses for the amusement of heads of governments. While professional and respectful conduct was expected of most members of the court, the Fool existed to give an image of laxness….

Science and innovation are chaotic, stochastic processes that cannot be governed and controlled by desk-bound planners and politicians, whatever their intentions.  Good scientists are by definition anarchists. –Theo Wallimann, ETH Zurich Abstract Although profitable, cancer therapy has failed to live up to the promises of the War on Cancer waged since 1971. Modern chemotherapy can…

There’s a certain kind of economic technocrat who tosses around the term “economies of scale” like a Young Earth creationist tosses around the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is true of legacy liberalism, obviously, which is still defined by the mid-20th century mass-production paradigm of Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith and Alfred Chandler. It’s also…

New research, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that a large fallout plume of oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is deposited on the seafloor. This is a significant finding because this 2-million barrels worth of oil was originally thought to be trapped…

Ask the average person on the street what kills more Americans – choking yourself to get off or evil terrorists? I haven’t done this myself but I suspect the results would be tilted quite far to the “evil terrorist” side. And why wouldn’t they be? After all, America is engaged in an epic struggle against…

We already knew Joe Biden was a useful idiot for the “Green” (actually greenwashed) or “Progressive” wing of corporate capital, because of his indignation over the “theft” of “intellectual property.” He denounced “stealing” songs or movies as morally equivalent to a “smash-and-grab at Macy’s” — and in keeping with that belief has supervised FBI actions…

At The Washington Post, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Jared Bernstein argues that “the Federal Reserve can reduce inequality,” that by “using its interest-rate tools to keep the cost of borrowing down and signaling to the investor community that it is committed to keeping rates low, it can help to trigger job-creating activity.”…

The election season is upon us, and we’re hearing the usual political promises about raising wages. Democrats pledge to raise the minimum wage and assure equal pay for equal work for men and women. Republicans usually oppose those things, but their explanations are typically lame. (“The burden on small business would be increased too much.”)…

America leads the world. No other nation imprisons more people than we do. Over 2.2 million men, women, and children currently reside in penitentiaries; another 4 million are under criminal supervision. In the past forty years, the incarcerated population has increased by a factor of five. Billions of our tax dollars are spent maintaining prisons…

In a new article for Rolling Stone, “Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire,” Tim Dickinson attempts to present the frequently demonized brothers Koch as essentially hardline libertarians, whose radical free market ideology is thoroughly mixed into their business philosophy and practices. We’ve all seen this article before. Liberal media outlets have made a whole industry…

I often hear people make casual remarks like, “Well, the State has a right to collect taxes,” “the State has a right to punish criminals,” or “the State has a right to controls its borders.” Inside, I am always somewhat horrified at how very easily these kinds of assumptions are made, at how obvious the…

According to Damon Linker, spontaneous order “might be the silliest and most harmful of all” libertarian ideas (“Libertarianism’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea,” The Week, Sept. 26). He summarizes spontaneous order, popularized by Hayek in the 20th century, as the belief that “when groups of individuals are left alone, without government oversight or…