How Washington Protects Your Privacy and Liberty

Preserving trust in government is the highest good—at least for politicians. To create that trust, government continually spawns façades to make people believe their rights are safe. Few things better illustrate this charade than the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. In 2004, three years after the Patriot Act was enacted, politicians started to worry [...]

Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush

There have now been many conservative and libertarian books covering the demise of American liberty under the U.S. Constitution, so if you don’t think you need to read another one, I understand. Still, if that’s what you think, you’re wrong. The latest entry in the genre, Thomas Woods and Kevin Gutzman’s Who Killed the Constitution?, [...]

Book Reviews – October 2006

• Reviving the Invisible Hand: The
  Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century
  by Deepak Lal Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
  
• Laws of Fear
  by Cass Sunstein Reviewed by Donald J. Boudreaux
  
• Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
  Empire’s
  Slaves
  by Adam Hochschild Reviewed by Becky Akers
  
• Why Men Earn More
  by Warren Farrell Reviewed by George C. Leef
  

One Man’s Regulatory Nightmare

I am an independent homebuilder in Granite City, Illinois. If I told you that while building a housing development, I created a dangerous and mosquito-infested dump, ripped up a pristine pond, and created severe flooding for my neighbors, you would rightly be outraged—perhaps enough to call for government regulators to throw the book at me. [...]

The Right of Resistance

Many politicians talk as if citizens were obliged both to revere and obey their government. But there are few things more dangerous than swallowing the notion that government is entitled to boundless obedience from the people under its power. Throughout history, governments have occasionally overstepped the bounds of their legitimate power. What should be done [...]

The IRS, Now and Forever?

Since late last year, politicians in Washington, D.C., have been promising to save Americans from the Internal Revenue Service—to fundamentally reform the agency, once and for all. The surge of anti-IRS outrage fits a dismal pattern in recent American history. On July 30, 1996, when signing a bill to provide meager additional protections to taxpayers, [...]

The Myth of the Independent Fed

Dr. DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. Ever since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an independent agency operated by selfless public servants striving to fine-tune the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non-political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat. Yet, [...]