Individual Rights & Law
An Interview with a “Capitalist Pig”
Jonathan Hoenig on Hedge Funds, the Economic Crisis, and the Future of America
Discusses the nature and value of hedge funds, the ill effects of economic regulations, and how to fight for free markets. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Justice Holmes and the Empty Constitution (accessible for free)
Examines the meaning and consequences of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dissent in Lochner v. New York, showing how and why it has devastated American jurisprudence, and indicating what future jurists must grasp and do in order to begin reversing the damage. Read the article.
Energy at the Speed of Thought:
The Original Alternative Energy Market
Surveys the history of the U.S. energy industry, with special emphasis on oil as the lifeblood of the modern world and on freedom as the condition that enabled oilmen to make it flow. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
A Brief History of U.S. Farm Policy and the
Need for Free-Market Agriculture
Shows how the USDA has grown from a small, seemingly innocuous bureau promoting agricultural research to today’s freedom-thwarting, rights-violating, market-crushing behemoth. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law,
by Philip K. Howard
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Fooling Some of the People All the Time Updated and Revised: A Long Short Story, by David Einhorn
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and the World Today (accessible for free)
An Interview with Yaron Brook
Explains why, more than fifty years ago, Rand was able to project the kinds of crises we are seeing today. Read the interview.
America’s Unfree Market
Demonstrates the actual nature of the allegedly free market that delivered the current mayhem. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis (accessible for free)
Zeros in on the fundamental cause of the problem, showing that widespread acceptance of the morality of self-sacrifice necessitated the kinds of laws, regulations, and decisions that have driven the financial markets into the gutter. Read the article.
Lest We Be Doomed to Repeat It
A Survey of Amity Shlaes’s History of the Great Depression
Provides an essentialized chronology of the era, focusing on the (ominously familiar sounding) policies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Of Freedom and Fat: Why Anti-Obesity Laws Are Immoral
Discusses efforts at state and federal levels to put Americans on a collective diet by violating the rights of food producers, restaurateurs, and consumers.Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Houston, We Have a (Zoning) Problem
Demonstrates that Houston’s absence of zoning laws is largely responsible for the city’s relative health and prosperity, and urges Houstonians to halt and reverse the encroachments on their property rights before they find themselves zoned. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions,
by Dan Ariely
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Concierge Medicine: A New System to Get the Best Healthcare, by Steven D. Knope, MD
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Capitalism and the Moral High Ground (accessible for free)
Concretizes the selfishness-enabling nature of capitalism and shows why this feature makes it the only moral social system on earth. Read the article.
Reason or Faith: The Republican Alternative (accessible for free)
Analyzes the resounding Republican defeat and shows that the party faces a fundamental decision that will determine whether it orchestrates a comeback or stumbles into further defeat. Read the article.
Net Neutrality: Toward a Stupid Internet
Focuses on the principle of property rights as it applies to the Internet in the face of increasing calls for government controls of this, as yet, relatively free market. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Bubble Boy: Alan Greenspan’s Rejection of Reason and Morality
Exposes Greenspan as anything but a principled capitalist whose free-market ideas somehow failed. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
The Assault on Energy Producers
Surveys various ways in which the government violates the rights of energy producers and thereby impedes our supply of energy and raises prices on everything in the marketplace. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, by Burton Folsom Jr.
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000, by Adam Fairclough
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
McBama vs. America (accessible for free)
Surveys the promises of John McCain and Barack Obama, shows that these intentions are at odds with the American ideal of individual rights, demonstrates that the cause of such political aims is a particular moral philosophy (shared by McCain and Obama), and calls for Americans to repudiate that morality and to embrace instead a morality that supports the American ideal. Read the article.
The Resurgence of Big Government
Identifies the cause of America’s two-decade swing to the right, explains why this cause was philosophically insufficient to sustain the movement toward capitalism, and indicates what Americans must understand if we want to resume the trek toward freedom, armed with the means to sustain it. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America (accessible for free)
Identifies the theory behind the Massachusetts mandatory health insurance program, exposes the program as a fiasco, explains why the theory had to fail in practice, and sheds light on the only genuine, rights-respecting means to affordable, accessible health care for Americans. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Deeper Than Kelo: The Roots of the Property Rights Crisis
Surveys the pivotal historic events that paved the way for today’s flagrant violations of property rights in America, documents the United States Supreme Court’s indifference to and complicity in the crimes in question, and indicates the solution to the crisis. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
How the FDA Violates Rights and Hinders Health
Surveys the history, nature, and consequences of this behemoth government agency; shows that it is impractical and immoral; and indicates how, in the absence of the FDA, the free market could provide the highest possible level of drug safety and efficacy. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid (accessible for free)
Surveys the history and achievements of America’s electricity entrepreneurs, shows how government interference in the transmission grid has hampered their enterprises from the outset to the present day, and indicates what America must do to liberate the grid and enable a new wave of entrepreneurs to supply this vital product commensurate with the country’s demand. Read the article.
The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, by Steven M. Teles
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Vindicating Capitalism: The Real History of the Standard Oil Company
Examines the inception and rise of Standard Oil, demonstrates that the company’s immense success was the result not of so-called “anti-competitive” practices or “predatory pricing” but of its superior efficiency and productivity, and does long-overdo justice to one of the greatest producers of life-serving values in history: John D. Rockefeller. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible only to subscribers).
Immigration and Individual Rights (accessible for free)
Zeros in on the basic principle of America and demonstrates that this principle mandates a policy of open immigration, debunks several common arguments for prohibiting or limiting immigration, shows why all such arguments are necessarily invalid, and indicates what Americans must do if we are to reestablish and maintain the kind of moral, rights-respecting immigration policy that was advocated by the Founders. Read the article.
Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care” (accessible for free)
Surveys the history of government interference in health insurance and medicine in America, specifying the rights violations and economic problems caused thereby; enumerates the failed attempts to solve those economic problems by means of further government interference; and shows that the only viable solution to the debacle at hand is to gradually and systematically transition to a rights-respecting, fully free market in these industries. Read the article.
Instrumentalism and the Disintegration of American Tort Law
Illustrates the utter insanity of today’s liability law, recounts the roots and original purpose of the law of torts, surveys the missing links and corrupt ideas that led to its destruction, and sheds light on the path to identifying a sound body of principles that will ground this field in the ultimate purpose of objective law: the protection of individual rights. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
The Morality of Moneylending: A Short History (accessible for free)
Presents an essentialized history of usury, showing that, just as moneylenders are being damned and blamed for today’s “sub-prime mortgage crisis,” so they have been condemned and castigated for alleged wrongdoing from the beginning of Western civilization. Brook zeros in on the economic and moral premises that give rise to contempt for this profession; he identifies the moral-practical dichotomy inherent in these ideas; and he discusses a unified set of principles that must be understood and embraced if moneylending is to be seen as the noble business that it actually is. Read the article.
Property and Principle
A Review Essay on Bernard H. Siegan’s Economic Liberties and the Constitution
Analyzes Bernard H. Siegan’s Economic Liberties and the Constitution, showing the first edition of the book (not the second edition) to be a valuable source for those seeking to understand how legal protections for property rights in America were gradually lost. Salzman also shows that, although Economic Liberties has certain virtues and is one of the best scholarly books on the subject, it fails to provide a proper philosophical grounding of property rights, and thus cannot stand on its own in defense thereof. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
The Decline and Fall of American Conservatism (accessible for free)
Examines today’s putatively splintered conservative movement, zeros in on the essence of its two dominant factions, and shows the movement to be only superficially split while fundamentally unified—and stultified—by the conservatives’ universal acceptance of a morality that is antithetical to liberty. Read the article.
Religion vs. Free Speech (accessible for free)
Demonstrates that the tenets of religion are incompatible with the right to free speech, and shows why those who want to establish and maintain freedom of speech must repudiate religion and embrace the rational, secular foundation for rights. Read the article.
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