A nationwide system of gun registration could be a step toward national gun confiscation. However, antigun bureaucrats need not go that far to use the expanded background check system to abuse the rights of gun owners. Gun owners could find themselves subject to surveillance and even harassment, such as more intensive screening by the Transportation Security Administration, because they own “too many” firearms.
During a recent trip to Mexico City, Jeff Deist was able to join Sergio Sarmiento of TV Azteca’s adn40 for a great discussion on the meaning of liberty and the power of markets.
The interview is available here.
Another Boeing 737 crashed Sunday in Ethiopia, killing all 157 aboard. This is the second crash of the new Boeing model Max 8 since October. Investigators have only begun sorting out this tragedy but some experts suggest that the plane’s automated safety software may have prevented the pilot from preventing the fatal plunge.
If software and sensors designed to prevent crashes actually increased the risk of catastrophe, then the Boeing accidents are another reminder that safety policies can have unintended fatal consequences.
As the issue of reparations for victims of slavery rages within the Democratic party and on cable news stations, we encounter a common problem: virtually no one is addressing the specifics of how such a reparations effort would be administered. Who exactly would receive these reparations payments? Who would pay them? How would guilt and victimhood be determined?
Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, appeared on the TV magazine 60 Minutes last night. If you’re craving empty calories, watch it here. The whole interview was an exercise in banal pleasantries, not to mention deadly dull. It’s what we’ve come to expect from Fed Chairs, nothing to see here, move along...
In the United States, local governments continue to play a sizable role in constraining the amount of develop-able land, and in adding costs to housing development in the form of development fees, zoning, building-materials mandates, and minimum-size mandates.
Yet, housing continues to cheaper in the US when compared to much of the world.
In discussions about the ease or difficulty with which one may attain the so-called “American Dream” it is not uncommon to hear that in the past, a family needed only a single wage earner in order to attain the alleged dream.
This is generally based on assumptions about the the past in which it is imagined that most married women stayed home and provided domestic services such as cooking and cleaning and childcare. They did the family’s shopping, took the children to school, and managed the household.
[This originally appeared in Libertarian Review in November 1978.]
Libertarians surely favor freedom of speech, that is, the right to speak without being hampered by the government. But the right to speak implies the right not to speak, the right to remain silent. Yet libertarians have themselves been strangely silent on the many instances of compulsory speech in our society.
March 3 marked the bicentennial of Belgian-born philosopher/economist Gustave de Molinari’s birth. Based on self-ownership and the private property derived from it, he forcefully defended every form of liberty. No wonder Frederic Bastiat named Molinari his successor.
Remembering Molinari’s across-the-board defense of liberty is particularly necessary at a time Americans pay lip service to it, but constantly say “there ought to be a law” that restricts it.
It’s widely agreed that we need more entrepreneurship for economic growth and a higher standard of living. But more is not always better.
In fact, there can be too much of a good thing, in entrepreneurship as in so many other things. The reason is that economic growth comes from successful entrepreneurship that is also productive. And not all entrepreneurs who earn profits contribute to economic growth if they have unproductive -- or, worse, destructive -- effects on the economy.
