Here at Learn Liberty, we like an optimistic muffin with our bitter coffee, so we took the liberty of compiling a naughty and nice list for the holiday season.
The Cato Institute has released Policing in America—an extensive national public opinion report that explores Americans’ attitudes toward the police based on an original Cato Institute/YouGov national survey of 2,000 Americans.
Trump’s victory has triggered a spate of post-hoc analysis about what went wrong. One of the major narratives to take root is that Trump’s win was fueled by a rejection of PC culture and identity politics broadly.
The following words represent the generally acknowledged mindset of a bureaucrat: “Rules are rules, fella. I don’t make ‘em. I just enforce ‘em.”
Now is the time to defend the liberty that makes possible a global civilization that enables friendship, family, cooperation, trade, mutual benefit, science, wisdom — in a word, life — and to challenge the modern anti-libertarian triumvirate and reveal the emptiness at its heart.
In 1950, a British dry cleaner refused to show his papers and brought down the whole system of national identity registration.
Let’s say that you’re a policymaker interested in reducing the size of government. Strategically, is it easier to cut government regulation or roll back the welfare state (thereby reducing government spending)?
This past week, I was on a panel for a Senate Hill Briefing entitled “Should compensation for bone marrow donors be legal?”
I argue that freedom of association is absolutely critical to sustaining relations of social trust across difference, even if it allows people to retreat further into their echo chambers.
Classical liberals all agree that government should be limited, but they disagree about how they get to that conclusion.
If you ask most people what classical liberalism is, they’ll say that it’s essentially free-market economics. But that’s a rather impoverished and narrow idea.
John Rawls famously argues that we should think about principles of justice from behind a “veil of ignorance.” How robust would you like the protection of religious freedom to be if you had no idea whether you turn out to be a Christian, Muslim, atheist, etc.? How would you like income to be distributed if […]
With minor variations between the states, the law governing the use and ownership of real property emerged as part of English common law.
In 1930, total government expenditure was 10% of GDP. Of that, approximately 3% was federal spending, and 7% was state and local spending. Today, government expenditure is about 40% of GDP, with 25% of that spending federal, and the remaining 15% state and local.
As Hayek long argued, a free society is governed by general, abstract rules that are equally applicable to all persons, including government actors.
In the absence of a compelling interest, such as preventing physical harm, governments have no right to control what goes on inside of churches and other houses of worship.
National and state governments often create accommodations to protect religious individuals from neutral, generally applicable laws, but they have also passed laws affirmatively protecting religious citizens from discrimination by both private and governmental entities. Most prominently, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, prohibits employers with more than 15 employees from […]
Politicians have never met a new taxpayer-funded government program they didn’t like.
If conservationists truly want to protect the pangolin, they’ll need to acknowledge the incentives of the humans that threaten them, and create policies which address them.
To answer this question we must first learn the distinction between contemporary conceptions of freedom and “The Freedom of the Ancients.”
Rather than invent new human rights, people who are concerned about poverty should first ask what kind of barriers government creates that prevent social mobility. Those barriers should all be removed before any thought is given to taxing some people in order to give money or resources to others.
“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” — Milton Friedman
There are two problems with an estate tax: 1. The belief that estates should be taxed at all reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, and 2. The actual taxing of estates has very different effects than those that advocates imagine it will have.