The White House is shrugging off the Republican electoral victories. But we know what the elections mean: The people are fed up with the march toward nationalization and socialism. Just like the 2006 elections were a repudiation of Bush’s war policy, yesterday marked public discontent with the Democrats’ war on the economy. This is all [...]

Second only to Ron Paul, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson is the most pro-liberty politician of any prominence. It looks like he might be considering a presidential run. Johnson seems like a dream come true (at least for a politician). For example, he supports the second amendment, marijuana legalization, and fought [...]

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 [...]

In 1971 Hubert Humphrey was running for president (again; but lost the Democratic nomination to George McGovern), and I was an economics major at the University of Florida. Humphrey was giving a campaign speech on campus and I went to listen.
Humphrey was facing a very rowdy crowd which was so loud in its jeers [...]

Japan’s historic election Sunday gave the Democratic Party an overwhelming victory over the Liberal Democrats that have dominated Japan’s government for 55 years.  The Liberal Democrats oversaw Japan’s industrial policy that supported Japan’s dominant firms during Japan’s rise as a major economic power during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.  Indeed, many American economists argued the [...]

There was a certain horrifying fascination to observe the speed and enthusiasm with which conservatives embraced the unprecedented growth of government power and size under George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. A Crisis and Leviathan case study in the “ratchet-effect” of “crises” — documented brilliantly throughout by Bob Higgs and reprinted as our [...]

When Nancy Pelosi convenes her new House Un-American Activities Committee to call forth ObamaCare protestors (see her “‘Un-American’ Attacks Can’t Derail Health Care Debate“), I hope she’ll find room on the docket for a few other, arguably more egregiously un-American activities—and bring their perpetrators to account:
Torture
In the black-and-white films I loved as a child, the [...]

As the race for the presidency began to get rolling in 1928, the editors of Life magazine (at that time an outlet for satirical writing) prevailed on my fellow Cherokee Oklahoman Will Rogers, arguably the best known and best loved man in the country, to run for the office as the candidate of the Anti-Bunk [...]

When Honduras’s president Manuel Zalaya attempted recently to unconstitutionally extend his powers, in this case to thwart his term limit, Honduras’s Congress—controlled by the president’s own party—and Supreme Court acted quickly and decisively to remove him from office, and utilized the military to enforce their rulings.
In contrast, as a series of U.S. presidents has unconstitutionally [...]

In the following video, “Human Rights Group Campaigns to End Use of Child Politicians in Africa,” the Onion News Network brilliantly satirizes the hypocrisy and shallowness of politics, compulsory education, government-mandated childhood community service, child abuse, and the view that children should be groomed to seek political office.
Human Rights Group Campaigns To End Use Of [...]