Like Prohibition, high taxes lead to big profit opportunities for people who break the law, which leads to smuggling, which in turn invites some pretty nasty people into the business.

We’re taught that the swashbuckling visionary Teddy Roosevelt rushed to the aid of freedom fighters in Panama, helped them secure their independence from Colombia, and then led the building of the Canal in just the right spot. Maybe the truth is a little different — from this 2002 book review.

Karl and Groucho. Two men named Marx. Both brought tears to the eyes of millions but for very, very different reasons.

Seventeen years since I wrote this article, Rwanda’s score on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom makes it the 39th freest economy in the world, out of nearly 180 countries ranked.

In November 2000 Louis Schimmel swept away the government of Hamtramck, Michigan, and literally took over the city–lock, stock, and barrel.

Socialists take aquariums and turn them into fish soup. The endless socialist quest for whatever it is socialists quest for all adds up to pitifully little—nothing more, in fact, than what French economist Frédéric Bastiat dismissed more than a century and a half ago as “legalized plunder.”

Most people of faith—whether they be Christian, Jew, Muslim, or something else—would ordinarily be the first to argue that God doesn’t need federal funds to do His work; just a change of heart will do, one heart at a time.

Every day, somebody somewhere gets a great idea and thinks nothing of stealing from others through government to fund it. Those of us who are troubled by these trigger-happy statists need to become more active and vocal in exposing their schemes.

Do we need a reminder that long-term pols with lots of “experience” in Washington have blessed Americans with trillions in debt and a federal government that sucks more and more from our wallets year after year after year?

Think about it: a major motion picture that dares to lump Nazis and communists into one reprehensible socialist dung-heap. Extraordinary!

Thankfully, the question of abolishing the Electoral College is moot because the hurdles a constitutional amendment has to jump are simply too high. 

We need to recognize that shorthand just won’t do the job when talking about how complex principles apply to current-day issues.

The best way to reform welfare programs is to eliminate them.

Sadly, those who think government must provide deposit insurance fail to realize how much of the problem they see is already the result of government’s own handiwork.

Does the mere prevalence of guns in American society contribute to gun violence? If statistics matter, the answer is no.

The first census in 1790 included a question about race and residence, but that was about the sum of it. In the years since, the census has morphed into much more than a head count.

Jitneys have a long and honorable tradition in America.

To note that government rests on the use of force is not some radical anarchist idea. It is the very definition of the institution and its ultimate distinguishing feature. For much of the last half millennium, political scientists of virtually every stripe accepted the notion as fact. No respectable scholar tried to paper it over and pass government off as some kind of voluntary, benevolent society.

Running against Herbert Hoover in 1932, Roosevelt campaigned as an advocate of limited government, even (correctly) accusing Hoover of “reckless and extravagant spending” and of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” 

At all levels of government, there’s a bipartisan effort to impose new or higher taxes and mislabel them as seemingly less onerous “user fees”. Sometimes, a user fee is indeed a user fee. Other times, it’s not that at all. Instead, it’s a tax hike disguised by a misnomer.