Essays

The State of Our Union: A House Divided, Enslaved & Mired in Past Mistakes

"The list of abuses being perpetrated against the American people by their government is growing rapidly: SWAT teams crashing through doors. Militarized police shooting unarmed citizens. Traffic cops tasering old men and pregnant women for not complying fast enough with an order. Resource officers shackling children for acting like children. Citizens being jailed for growing vegetable gardens in their front yards and holding prayer services in their backyards. Drivers having their cash seized under the pretext that they might have done something wrong. Brace yourselves. We are approaching critical mass."

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Homeland Security’s Multibillion-Dollar Comedy Show

"What does the United States have to show for tens of billions of dollars of Homeland Security antiterrorism spending by local and state governments? Michael Sheehan, former New York City deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, observed, 'I firmly believe that those huge budget increases have not significantly contributed to our post–9/11 security.' But the war on terrorism has been an unmitigated victory for Leviathan and politicians at every level of government."

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To Lower Healthcare Costs, End The “Certificates Of Need” Racket

"Everybody needs food, but the government does not require entrepreneurs to obtain a certificate of need before opening or expanding a grocery store. Everybody needs healthcare at one time or another, but the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and 35 states require hospitals to obtain certificates of need (called CONs) before they open their doors or expand. Certificates of need tend to favor large non-profit operations, which are now blocking competition while scamming patients and taxpayers alike."

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Black helicopters and ‘Ride of the Valkyries’: The war on pot in California

"Still fighting the culture wars, Reagan and his advisers decided early on that marijuana was the biggest drug threat facing the country. And so a couple of years into his first term, federal and California officials came up with a battle plan to target cultivation in the northern part of the state. The phrase 'battle plan' isn’t much of an exaggeration here."

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President Trump’s ‘Friends’ in Saudi Arabia

"Trump and his unabashedly Iranophobic generals have allowed the United States to become a patsy for Saudi Arabia, actively abetting or tacitly endorsing MBS’s ambitions. Yet whatever the administration’s purported intent, throwing in with the Crown Prince will only exacerbate the disorder that previous U.S. administrations have done so much to create."

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Governments Try to Control Language to Hilarious Results

"The people of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro all speak the same language, the Serbo-Croatian language, yet their respective governments claim that they speak Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. In reality, the differences between how people speak in the former Yugoslavia are as little as the differences between English in Britain and the United States. Nonetheless, their respective governments sought to courageously protect their people from not speaking a language named after their national identity."

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Deadly ‘swatting’ hoaxes and the dangerous conditioning of cops

"Sometimes a rifle really is just a pellet gun. Sometimes a hostage situation is a prank. Sometimes a dispatcher gets it wrong. And sometimes a man 'reaching for his waistband' is just trying to pull up his pants. But these stories also show that what the police claim to have seen isn’t what happened."

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Central Planning Ignores the Needs of Women

"An American visiting the Communist Bloc in the 1980s would be aghast to find most women still doing laundry the way they had in the United States 50 years prior, without washing machines. The communist system didn’t produce machines to make women’s lives easier for the same reason it neglected their other needs and wants. For all the complaints about the profit motive, markets incentivize people to satisfy each other’s preferences through voluntary exchange, while state-run economies provide no such incentive. There is no shortage of soaring communist rhetoric on gender equality, but that cannot make up for the pervasive and sexist shortages under central planning."

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