Big Government

CNET's Executive Editor David Coursey claims that we can head off future government intervention if we only do what is needed today.

Vigilance about co-opted semantics is vital because language mediates thoughts, actions, and hence public debate and policy.

Regulators and their political backers believe that only government can protect people from the risks of everyday life. Adam Young explains.

On May 29, the commencement exercises at Estero High School in Fort Myers, Florida, took place without eighteen-year-old honor student Lindsay Brown. The reason? A school official saw a kitchen knife with a five-inch blade on the floor of her car in the school parking lot and reported it to the local sheriff. Lindsay was suspended for five days, arrested on a felony charge, and spent part of May 21 in jail. Miss Brown, who accidentally left the knife in the car while moving some belongings over the previous weekend, is one of the more recent victims of the "zero-tolerance" policies most public schools have adopted toward prohibited items.

Doctors and patients fed up with the current medical system are negotiating something entirely new, and the AMA is very unhappy. 

The lands were public and the firefighters government employees. These two facts have much to do with why they died. Walter Block explains. 

In the 1950s, the government hatched a plan for martial law, state-planned production, and rationing in the event of a nuclear holocaust. It would have failed.

A former secretary of labor regrets the state's declining effective power over economic life. A review by Christopher Westley. 

Tax protestors prevailed and stopped a new tax. Some lawmakers called it "mob rule," but it was really just state taxpayers trying to preserve liberty.

The Alternative Minimum Tax was supposed to soak the rich. Predictably, it is now poised to soak huge swaths of the middle class.