March 17, 2025

Birthright citizenship: The facts

According to the relevant part of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they resid...

October 18, 2024

A libertarian wrestles with Hamas

I (I am Hamas) am going to kill you (you are Israel).  I have a knife.  I going to murder not only you, but also your wife, kids, parents, siblings.  I have strapped to the front of me my two young children, aged three....

October 2, 2024

Affirmative action in sports and medicine

The winners in the Paris Olympics (2024) gold medal for Canada in the four by 100 were Andre De Grasse, Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake, and Brendon Rodney.  For those sports fans who were Rip van Winkling it, in this relay race, each athlete run...

June 22, 2024

Antisemitism vs. anti-Israelism

I have antisemitic tendencies and am also a critic of Israel.  With the advent of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which has just passed the House of Representatives with a 320-91 vote, and will soon wend its way toward the Senate, I shall b...

May 1, 2024

The libertarian case against punishing a ‘conspiracy’

Moe, Larry, and Curly are planning to rob a bank. They are careful and exhaustive in their deliberations.  They determine which of them will drive the getaway car.  They discuss, intensively, the best access and egress routes b...

April 3, 2024

When student basketball teams unionize

What’s the latest in labor union news?  The Dartmouth basketball team has formed a labor union. Say what? Aren’t these labor organizations only for employees?  Isn’t it true that the Dartmouth basketball team ...

December 12, 2023

Should Israel be nonviolent like India?

Thomas Friedman is a writer for the New York Times.  He is an admirer of Manmohan Singh.  The latter was India’s prime minister in late November 2008, when Pakistani militants invaded his country and murdered almost 200 tota...

December 10, 2023

Let’s hear it for segregation?

Thanks to black university students, segregation is coming back into its own.  Not government-mandated coercive segregation under Jim Crow, with its back-of-the-bus rules, separate washrooms, “whites” and “blacks only...

May 27, 2023

How to cancel Woke U

It should not shock anyone, except for perhaps Rip Van Winkle, and even he should have long ago stopped his slumber, that our universities are now intellectual cesspools.  Political correctness, wokeism, DIE, cultural and economic Marxism, ...

April 14, 2023

How about affirmative action for the NBA?

Suppose there were affirmative action for the National Basketball Association.  What would it look like? Before we address that question, we must ask: why would anyone even think of such a policy?  It is simple.  We w...

January 8, 2023

We really could use a grievance scorecard

In the good old days, when men were men, it was easy to tell the political ball players without a scorecard, at least from the socialist and communist point of view, thanks to economic Marxism.  You would always distinguish the good guys fr...

November 23, 2022

The libertarian take on discrimination

What with the Supreme Court's hearing of the Students for Fair Admission case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, racial discrimination is now in the news.  Like two contending (intellectual) armies, liberal...

November 16, 2022

Critical Race Theory and Freudianism

These two concepts are rarely if ever mentioned together.  Yet they have more than just a little bit in common, none of it good. Critical Race Theory (CRT) maintains that in all cases in which blacks fall behind whites (or Asians, who do...

October 6, 2022

Isn't it strange that some of the smartest people are socialists?

Isn't it strange that some of the smartest people in our society are socialists? Albert Einstein was no dummy; if there were a contest for the brainiest man who ever lived, he might be not only a contender, but the winner.  Noam Chom...

June 21, 2022

Non-PC truth: Stereotypes are not all bad

Stereotypes have a bad press, particularly with the progressive wokesters on the left.  This mode of expressions is deemed to be insulting and demeaning.  And not only that, but stereotypes are also widely thought to be inaccurate...

December 21, 2021

Diversity, equality, inclusion...give me a break

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) amounts to the complaint that there are too many white males on the faculty and the demand that this be radically changed, forthwith.  It would appear, at least to the grievants, that females, "people of c...

October 28, 2021

To fix COVID, start with fixing politically correct medicine

How are we human beings going to be able to kick the butts of COVID creatures infinitesimally smaller than we are?  Or are we going to be like Goliath, who fell to the Lilliputian David? It all depends upon whether we embrace science or ...

September 29, 2021

Did a Harvard professor just refute libertarianism?

Harvard psychology professor and world-class public intellectual Steven Pinker was recently interviewed by David Marchese of the New York Times. Here is a bit of the views of this exceedingly bright and fascinating man: Q: "Is it ...

September 1, 2021

It is all the wokesters' and government's fault

All major problems can be fairly laid at the door of the government, particularly on the woke philosophy that energizes all too much of its behavior. They take half the GDP away from us.  Most of these funds are spent in wasteful ways: p...

July 14, 2021

In defense of the speculator

In the view of most economic illiterates, speculators do not bake bread; they do not supply medicines; they are AWOL when it comes to working on the shop floor; they don't teach math or the cello.  They are thus parasites on others who ...

May 7, 2021

Would a libertarian force you into COVID quarantine?

What should be the libertarian position on whether to impose quarantines to reduce the incidence of the coronavirus? One argument is that we should do no such thing since a quarantine is equivalent to house arrest.  It is a violation of ...

April 6, 2021

Bernie Sanders's case for raising the minimum wage falls apart

"[I]n my view, it all comes down to this.  Are you on the side of the working people in America who desperately need a raise?  Or are you on the side of the wealthy and the powerful who want to continue exploiting their worke...

February 24, 2021

You know you're in la-la land when pacifists oppose defensive missile systems

All decent people are peaceniks.  This holds true always, but especially in a nuclear age, when one misstep, whether on purpose or not, can spell the deaths of not millions, but billions of people.  It is only a maniacal misanthro...

February 5, 2021

Krugman's minimum wage law support is an attack on American workers

There are recalls for automobiles.  There ought to be one for economists.  If there were, Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, would have to be re-educated in Economics 101 in order to retain his Ph.D. degree.  I ...

December 31, 2020

Yes, there's still a point to voting in the Georgia runoff

It is by now far more than obvious that the presidential vote was massively altered in at least five states, among them Georgia. At the very least, the Republican-controlled legislatures in these states should be legally obliged to refuse to confi...

November 21, 2020

Whole Foods takes two steps forward, one step back on Black Lives Matter uniforms

Whole Foods Market seems to have gotten its tail in a crack, at least in Canada.  What's the story? When the Black Lives Matter movement picked up steam earlier this year, some WFM employees came to work there wearing insignias and c...

October 21, 2020

Scraping to find what left and right have in common

We live in highly contentious times.  In bygone days, politicians not only worked with each other across the aisle, but made actual friends of one another — for example, Republican president Ronald Reagan and Democratic House speaker ...

July 28, 2020

How much should we punish people for hateful thoughts?

Consider someone who screams, "Hitler should have finished you off," for example, while committing a crime against a Jew.  Or a person who uses the N-word while assaulting a black person.  Or an evildoer who adds insult ...

June 24, 2020

Will robots take over our jobs?

In a very important episode of the hit television series South Park, people from the future come back to our time in order to seek work.  It appears that there will be (is?) severe unemployment several hundred years from now.  The...

June 13, 2020

The sacred cow of socialized medicine

It is important, especially in this age of the coronavirus, to take on the sacred cow of socialized medicine. Let us begin by rehearsing the basic economic element of this system.  Instead of purchasing our own medical services, as we do...

May 22, 2020

It's the productivity, stupid!

All too many financial journalists fail to realize that productivity, not employer generosity, determines wages.  (Actually, it is discounted marginal revenue productivity, but we don't have to go into all of that.) They write things...

May 9, 2020

Minimum Wage Laws Create Unemployment

This insight is always important, in that the unemployment created by this pernicious legislation always attacks the poor and the unskilled, precisely the people who can least afford it.  But it is even more crucial to understand this econo...

April 6, 2020

The coronavirus fix is too politically incorrect to implement

Suppose there were a deadly virus that disproportionately attacked Jewish people, akin to Tay-Sachs disease, but was contagious via the air through sneezing, or via direct human-to-human touch, or indirectly, via cardboard or metal.  What w...

March 18, 2020

In defense of gentrification

Gentrification gets bad press.  It is blamed for all sorts of misconduct.  This concept applies to a situation in which wealthy renters or homeowners displace poorer ones.  Gays have often been blamed for this behavior, ...

March 13, 2020

How rent control actually hurts both tenants and landlords

Demand curves slope in a downward direction.  This means that the higher the price, the less of an item, or good, or service, will be sought.  The more road blocks, hurdles, thumbtacks placed in the way of any given action, the le...

February 10, 2020

The case to get rid of the Federal Aviation Administration

If you oppose public schooling, you are thought to be against education; the possibility that you favor private institutions of learning never quite arises.  If you reject government highways as congested death traps, you are seen as an opp...