The Police State

A case study of an agency that never stops expanding in its budget and power, despite failures all around. 

Tucker was the voice for individualist anarchism in the late 19th century, and J. William Lloyd was his follower. This essay is from the Lloyd papers, now part of the Mises Institute archives.

When the state passes a law, even if trivial, it backs that law by the threat of force. Sometimes it actually uses it. Ray Haynes explains. 

Government intervention designed to stop the spread of disease is making matters worse, by destroying property and institutionalizing a moral hazard. Christopher Westley explains.

Traffic is a powerful and persuasive argument against the domestic and international drug war. Review and critique by Dale Steinreich.

A CNN report on a Russian police academy, writes Adam Young, masks the brutality of training children to serve as state revenue agents.

E.O. Wilson of Harvard University is among the world's most esteemed biologists. An authority on ants, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes and coined the term "sociobiology," outraging his peers by suggesting that human behavior has some relation to human nature. Sadly, these triumphs seem to have inspired him to lay down the law on everything—a trend that culminated about a year ago in his book Consilience, which purports to unify all branches of science, religion, ethics, and art into a recipe for human happiness.

In The Foundations of Leninism, Stalin declared "For the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries." What he secured instead was the slavish devotion of Western intellectuals who claimed to represent the proletariat: left intellectuals. With some exceptions, these apologists either ignored or adamantly denied the atrocities of Stalinism. In doing so, they became accomplices to the bloodbath that was Soviet communism; that is, Marxism as popularized by Lenin.

How the state causes crime.

Turning a homicide into a massacre.