Bob Barr, David Keene and Grover Norquist have called for civilian trials of terror suspects, and urged that the “scaremongering about these issues has to stop.”
There are problems with civilian trials, of course. Many detainees were freed by Bush’s extralegal system who would have likely been convicted and be sitting in prison right now. And [...]

In the current issue of Books & Culture, Professor Paul Harvey (not to be confused with the late radio icon) takes aim at my “imagined” (read: invented) tradition of classical liberalism on race. You can read his full review here.
Harvey concedes that Race and Liberty in America rediscovers “understudied authors.” Then he quickly moves on [...]

In a recent commentary titled “Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Political Economy,” I endeavored to show that an analytical understanding of past growth in the government’s size, scope, and power does not permit us to prescribe effective means of stopping or slowing this growth, particularly any simple “silver bullet” remedy, and I specifically disclaimed any personal [...]

Last week, I spoke to a class at Idlewild Presbyterian Church on the economics of drug prohibition. My notes are below.  Cross-posted at Division of Labour.

Although democracy now comes closer than anything else to serving as a world religion, it has never lacked critics. For millennia those critics, such as Aristotle, had large followings among political thinkers and practicing politicians. Even as late as 1787, when a group of prominent men met in Philadelphia to compose the U.S. Constitution, democracy [...]

Megan Williams now says she was lying all along when accusing seven men of kidnapping, sexually abusing and assaulting her. The seven plead guilty to charges two years ago.
Indeed, “former Logan County prosecutor Brian Abraham, who was in charge of the case, said no one ever went to jail because of Williams’ statements. Instead, Abraham [...]

Peter Klein’s post about the bizarro world in which the SEC prefers not to define insider trading too carefully, lest that definition cramp the government’s prosecutorial style, reminds me of the similarly vague definition of price fixing for purposes of enforcing the antitrust laws. The best acccount I have seen of this matter comes from R. W. [...]

James Montanye’s recent posting on reciprocal rights theory and altruism provides the standard evolutionary biological (evo-devo) view, but as such fails to explain pure altruism or “radical altruism” and is inadequate to defend any consistent system of political economy and morality, including natural law and natural rights, individual liberty and the rule of law. [...]

It’s now, relatively speaking, a “victory” for civil liberties that Obama is reverting to the Bush detention policy, rather than adopting an even worse policy.

Obama loudly denounced Bush’s policy of “extraordinary renditioning,” whereby terror suspects were captured, transferred through secretive CIA sites, and delivered to foreign regimes — ones denounced by Bush et al. for their cruelty, like Syria and Egypt — where they were tortured. Maher Arar is among the highest-profile victims of this policy. A Canadian citizen [...]