All Posts Tagged With: "individual rights"

Split Decision

The Second Amendment’s affirmation of the right to keep and bear arms applies to individuals, not collectives. Anyone who can read plain English already knew that. But now we have a U.S. appellate court saying so. That can’t hurt. The October ruling of a three-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals grew out [...]

1Feb2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Tall Grass, Parked Cars, and Other So-Called Offenses

Scott McPherson is a freelance writer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom.” —F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom Proponents of overactive government never challenge the principle that government exists to protect individual rights. Rather, they have simply expanded the definition of rights to include anything [...]

1Jan2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Liberty, Property, and Crime

No society can long exist in a climate of rampant crime, especially if it is properly defined as any act that violates the life, liberty, or property of another. and when the term “crime” is used, that is generally what people mean. Of course many people, perhaps most, would also include victimless crimes such as [...]

1Nov2001 | | 2 comments | Continued

Individual and Society: Irreconcilable Enemies?

Contributing editor Tibor Machan is a professor at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. Do individual rights clash with the interests and “rights” of communities? Some say that they do, at least sometimes. And some think they clash quite often. But an individual “right” that can be abrogated at will whenever [...]

1Oct2001 | | 2 comments | Continued

The Rule of Law and Freedom in Emerging Democracies: A Madisonian Perspective

James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute. The collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe, and the fall of the Soviet Union two years later, have increased the number of democracies in the world to a total of 120. Of those, however, only 85 are classified as [...]

1Aug2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Frederic Bastiat: The Primacy of Property

James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute and a professor of economics at Towson University in Maryland. This is adapted from a longer article that will appear in the September 2001 Journal des Économistes. Reprinted by permission. Frédéric Bastiat, although best known as an economic journalist, was also a pioneer [...]

1Jun2001 | | 2 comments | Continued

Rights Without Exceptions

Jeff Snyder is an attorney in New York City and is the “Gun Rights” columnist for American Handgunner magazine. This article is adapted from columns he wrote in the November/December 2000, January/February 2001, and May/June 2001 issues of that magazine. He is the author of Nation of Cowards: Essays on the Ethics of Gun Control [...]

1May2001 | | 3 comments | Continued

The Pledge versus the Oath

When George W. Bush became president last January, he struck a familiar pose. Raising his right hand before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath serves to remind us that the United States is a constitutional republic with a federal [...]

1May2001 | | 7 comments | Continued

To Each According to His Need As He Sees It

As talk of an across-the-board cut in income tax rates fills the air, critics are apt to say that those who “need it most” will get little relief. The critics believe that wealthy people already have enough money and thus need no more. But low-income people do need more, so any tax-cut plan should primarily [...]

1May2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Constitutional Protection of Economic Liberty

Norman Barry, a contributing editor of Ideas on Liberty, is professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham in the UK. He is the author of An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (St. Martin’s Press). The Supreme Court has been deliberately neglectful of traditional American economic liberties. With the exception of some [...]

1Nov2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

Humble Hubris

Al Gore, presidential aspirant and environmental sage, once spoke admiringly of an Indian tribe whose leaders, he said, planned seven generations ahead. His message was clear: if only we shallow, conceited bourgeois Americans had the concern and humility to think like that. I don’t believe there was such a tribe. Anyone who does can’t tell [...]

1Mar2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

Government as Slave Owner

James Bovard is the author of Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State & the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin’s Press, 1999). The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” This assertion captured the idealism and the principles of this nation’s [...]

1Feb2000 | | 1 comment | Continued

States’ Rights Revisited

Lamenting the Supreme Court’s recent batch of pro-federalism decisions, the New York Times termed the Court’s newfound affinity for states’ rights “Supreme mischief,” “deeply disturbing” to right-thinkers everywhere. One expects such talk from dedicated cheerleaders for centralized power. What’s more disturbing, however, is the extent to which the Times’s perspective has gained credence among advocates [...]

1Dec1999 | | 7 comments | Continued

The Collectivist Illusion

Tibor Machan is a professor in the school of business and economics at Chapman University. Some fallacies are easy to detect. Consider the fallacy of composition: take a group of human beings and ascribe to it capacities only individuals can have. “Society says,” “We decided,” “America is violent.” Strictly speaking, none of these claims can [...]

1Dec1999 | | 3 comments | Continued

To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice

Over the last three decades, the share of GDP consumed by the public sector on crime control has tripled and now exceeds $100 billion annually, or about $1,000 per household. Crime rates have declined in the 1990s, suggesting some benefit from the expenditure, yet crime stubbornly remains three times higher than 30 years ago, according [...]

1Oct1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State

Ellen Frankel Paul is professor of political science and philosophy and deputy director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. David Kelley, erstwhile professor of philosophy, social commentator, and executive director of the Institute for Objectivist Studies, has written a marvelous yet slim volume exposing virtually everything that is wrong [...]

1Jun1999 | | 2 comments | Continued

Tensions in Early American Political Thought

According to the eminent historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock, republican theory (or “civic humanism”) was the most significant current of eighteenth-century English and American political philosophy. In the form of “country ideology,” republicanism gave “left” and “right” critics of government policies a framework and believable rhetoric for their arguments.

1May1999 | | 0 comments | Continued
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