All Posts Tagged With: "crime"

Libertarianism, from A to Z

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron’s primer on libertarian thought proceeds just as the title indicates: a collection of alphabetically arranged short essays on 105 topics. This is a more effective technique than one might imagine: Since many people unfamiliar with libertarianism approach it by way of specific questions and challenges, Miron provides answers. Readers of [...]

4Jan2012 | Aeon J. Skoble | 3 comments | Continued

Senseless

Do people really want to know why, on January 8, 2011, in Tucson, Arizona, a young man named Jared Lee Loughner engaged in mass murder? I submit they do not. Politicians, psychiatrists, pundits, and the press univocally assert that Loughner’s deed is the “senseless” product of mental illness. This belief in a nonexistent mental disease [...]

21Apr2011 | Thomas Szasz | 20 comments | Continued

The Road to Big Brother: One Man’s Struggle Against The Surveillance Society

As I write this review, millions of Americans are annoyed if not outraged over the recent measures adopted by the so-called Transportation Security Agency. Airline travelers hate the choice between going through a scanner that effectively undresses them and an aggressive grope of their bodies. Are those offensive procedures necessary? Are they legal? What is [...]

23Mar2011 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

The Medicalization of Suicide

Everyone now knows that suicide is a medical problem. Not long ago everyone knew that it was a religious and criminal problem. Bereft of the power of critical thinking and lacking historical knowledge, the human mind is a sponge for absorbing and magnifying error. The great American humorist Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818–1885) said [...]

22Sep2010 | Thomas Szasz | 3 comments | Continued

Attacks on Freedom

Something’s happened to America, and it isn’t good. It’s become easier to get into trouble. We’ve become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better [...]

22Sep2010 | John Stossel | 7 comments | Continued

In Defense of the Huddled Masses

In April Arizona attracted national attention when it enacted a strict anti-immigration law, SB1070, which authorizes police having “lawful contact” with a person who arouses “reasonable suspicion” that he is an illegal alien to make a “reasonable attempt . . . to determine the immigration status of the person.” The law is intended to make [...]

25Aug2010 | Aeon J. Skoble | 21 comments | Continued

Secure in Freedom

Language is indispensable to civilization. But because we rely on language so heavily—because it is our chief means of communicating with each other as well as a tool for forming and storing our thoughts—if used carelessly it can misshape our thoughts. Careless language (or, even worse, verbal legerdemain) often turns words or phrases with positive [...]

25Aug2010 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 14 comments | Continued

Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition

In perhaps no other public-policy question is the United States more hopelessly in the grip of a conventional wisdom that is utterly and egregiously wrong than drugs. Most Americans, no matter their political affiliation, are adamant supporters of the “war on drugs.” Try suggesting that the war might be stupendous folly and you’ll most likely [...]

9Jul2010 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

Can Gun Control Work?

Can Gun Control Work? is a first-rate addition to the literature on gun control. The book is not an attempt to advocate either side of the debate. Instead, it is an analysis of whether various types of control can achieve their stated objectives, especially reducing violence and crime. Jacobs concludes that gun control cannot work, [...]

6Jul2010 | Jeffrey Miron | 0 comments | Continued

The Pernicious Nature of Victimless-Crime Laws

Laws creating victimless crimes are particularly pernicious laws. Their associated evils are essential rather than accidental; that is, their destructive properties stem from their very nature as victimless. It will soon become clear why federal judges commonly write and speak of “the drug exception” to search-and-seizure (Fourth Amendment) jurisprudence, why double agents lead double lives [...]

27Jun2010 | Joseph S. Fulda | 3 comments | Continued

Legalize All Drugs

Reading the New York Post‘s popular Page Six gossip page recently, I was surprised to find a picture of me, followed by the lines: “ABC’S John Stossel wants the government to stop interfering with your right to get high. The crowd went silent at his call to legalize hard drugs.” I had attended a Marijuana [...]

1Oct2008 | John Stossel | 7 comments | Continued

The “Risk” of Liberty: Criminal Law in the Welfare State

Michael Giuliano is an attorney editor at Thomson Reuters. The word crime has come to include an ever-increasing assortment of activities that do not fit the intuitive meaning of the word. The law has criminalized behavior deemed risky or undesirable and actions or status having only vague relationships to undefined harms. The lawmaking process under [...]

1Sep2008 | Michael N. Giuliano | 4 comments | Continued

How Public Transit Undermines Safety

Everyone knows that automobile travel is dangerous. This naturally leads to the assumption that public transit ought to be encouraged as a means of improving travel safety. However, the issue is more complex than this simple assumption allows. In some respects, introducing more transit vehicles into the mix of urban transportation options will increase the [...]

1Apr2006 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

Yo, Brooklyn! Get Real About Politics and Sports

Brooklyn, New York, needs a reality check on sports—whether it comes to the borough’s past with baseball’s Dodgers, or its possible future with basketball’s Nets. Even though the Dodgers left for Los Angeles almost a half-century ago, for many that move still hangs like a dark cloud over Brooklyn. Some people trace the borough’s economic [...]

1Feb2005 | Raymond J. Keating | 1 comment | Continued

The Danger of National Identification

It seems innocuous. What could be so sinister about finding out who people are? But the national identification regime that some in government and the media want to establish in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks would likely do much to threaten individual privacy and security while doing little in itself to prevent terrorism. [...]

1Oct2002 | David M. Brown | 4 comments | Continued

Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation

Reviewed by John Seiler Across America’s vast territory stretches another country, an archipelago, few citizens know about: the Gulag Americana. Many of the inmates belong there: murderers, rapists, thieves. But many don’t, having been sent to prison for crimes that didn’t hurt anybody, especially nonviolent drug offenses. Going Up the River details the Hell of [...]

1Jul2002 | Joseph T. Hallinan | 1 comment | Continued

The Paradox of the Illiberal Cities

Alexander Moseley is currently between university appointments and working on two academic books and a novel. Cities have often been the bastions of enlightened living that abolish the prejudices which taint rural life. But while urban residents may be free from the invasive gossip and restrictive social codes of conduct that characterize small towns and [...]

1Nov2001 | Alex Moseley | 0 comments | Continued
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