After narrowly failing to make it through the California Assembly last year, AB 257 has been put back on the Sacramento agenda this year. Backers—unions and their Democrat operatives—think they can succeed this time. Now crunch time for that hypothesis is approaching, as the bill passed the state senate’s Labor, Public Employment and Retirement
In Freedom and the Law , Bruno Leoni argues that the main threat to liberty comes not from overweening officials but from the law that empowers them. As Murray Rothbard puts it, “The real and underlying menace to individual freedom is not the administrator but the legislative statute that makes the administrative ruling possible.” In that light,
Since the conclusion of World War II, each biennial session of Congress has ushered in a staggering 4-6 million words of additional legislation. However, amidst this flood of legal text, the State’s focus on expanding regulations and enforcing compliance has overshadowed its fundamental obligation: provision of security—the cornerstone of what
Much onerous and harmful government regulation can be prevented by the application of well-known and well-understood principles of logic. I will use the recent regulations placed upon Americans in response to the so-called pandemic. I refer to the panoply of regulations that government enacted starting in 2020 as the covid control program.
Like many libertarians, I initially assumed intellectual property (IP) was a legitimate type of property right. But I had misgivings from the start: there was just something too utilitarian and results oriented in Rand’s purportedly principled case for IP, and something too artificial about the state’s copyright and patent statutory
‘’The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.’’ James Madison Annals of Congress 434 (1789). Testing the Limits of Free Speech by Christopher Mayer Is the right to free speech, as Madison
In the grep cat American game of poker, the best players think in terms of mathematical expectation and long-term probabilities. It is the hallmark of a bad player to think in terms of immediate results to the exclusion of the long-term. Poker players well understand that the best players can be beaten in any specific instance. In a famous and
Introduction by Murray N. Rothbard We are all indebted to Carl Watner for uncovering an unknown work by the great Lysander Spooner, one that managed to escape the editor of Spooner’s Collected Works . Both the title and the substance of “Vices are not Crimes” highlight the unique role that morality and moral principle had for Spooner among the
[This article is excerpted from Let’s Abolish Government .] The free administration of justice was a principle of the common law, and it must necessarily be a part of every system of government which is not designed to be an engine in the hands of the rich for the oppression of the poor. In saying that the free administration of justice was a
Bill Clinton’s unpaid legal bills now exceed his net assets by several million dollars. And now, just as the president is getting ready to pack his bags, Franette McCulloch has seen to it that he’ll have one more lawsuit to deal with, one more charge of sexual harassment, and one more demand for $1 million on his way out the door. It started in
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.