The national furor over the TSA’s new procedures — culminating in yesterday’s “ Opt Out Day “ — has elicited the typical response from the bureaucracy and its apologists. Why, these invasive scans and “enhanced pat-downs” are only for your good, in order to ensure safe flying. You don’t want another attack, do you? This is a false tradeoff.
[An audio version of this article, read by Steven Ng, is available as a free MP3 download .] Unquestioning reverence for the police is one of the more unfortunate inculcations in our formative years. If it were not for the police, lawlessness and chaos would rule; therefore, we owe our safety, our civilization, our very lives to the selflessness
There is no epidemic of gun violence in America; quite the opposite in fact. But last week’s shooting at a high school in Florida was a grim and jarring reminder of deep cultural problems lurking just beneath the veneer of our materially comfortable society. Those problems are beyond the scope of libertarianism per se , but again we see that
The Indians of the Pacific Northwest are engaged in what may well be called the last Indian war. They are taking a stand against the never-ending encroachment and aggression of their white neighbors within the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The Indians’ fishing stations on the rivers of those three states are coveted by powerful
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, PublicAffairs, 2013 “ There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice .” —Charles de Montesquieu If there was any silver lining to the horrifying events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri which
The LA Times reported on December 16: Tucked deep inside the 1,603-page federal spending measure is a provision that effectively ends the federal government’s prohibition on medical marijuana and signals a major shift in drug policy. The bill’s passage over the weekend marks the first time Congress has approved nationally significant
Providence, Rhode Island, journalist Froma Harrop is as establishmentarian as they come, and her post-Christmas-Day-terrorist-bombing-attempt column does nothing to alleviate this impression. The title? “To Be Safe Flying, We’d Happily Perform This Strip Tease.” That failed attempt, you see, did not simply exhilarate those on the left and right,
Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital. The fact that all streets and land areas would be private would by itself solve many of the
Many people recoil from the idea of policing being done by private, for-profit enterprise. They imagine that such companies, in their attempt to maximize profit, would be even more abusive than government police. But what most fail to realize is that private ‘police’ already exist in America and to a large extent: there are an estimated 3 persons
[ This is Part Three of a three-part series on policing. See Part One and Part Two . ] One of the most successful ideological movements waged by government agencies in recent decades has been the so-called Broken Windows theory of policing. Popularized in the 1980s by George Kelling, the theory states that if minor violations are ignored — such as
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.