Impinging on religious liberty rarely, if ever, benefits the commons good, as Professor Mark Hall explains in this first installment in a series on religious liberty.
Pundits like to talk about foreign and domestic policy as if they are completely separate concerns. But as University of Tampa professor Abby Hall has been explaining in Learn Liberty’s six part series on foreign policy, there is not as much distinction between them as people often think. In fact, foreign policy often boomerangs back […]
The recent public fight between Apple and the FBI as well as the controversy over the Edward Snowden leaks make it seem as though government spying on American people is a recent phenomenon. In fact, government surveillance of U.S. citizens goes back over 100 years. Martin Luther King, for instance, was spied on extensively for […]
This piece was originally published at the Cato Institute. Tune into Learn Liberty’s Facebook page on Monday at 3pm for a Facebook Live event with professor Steve Hanke on this topic. With the arrival of President Hugo Chávez in 1999, Venezuela embraced Chavismo, a form of Andean socialism. In 2013, Chávez met the Grim Reaper […]
Earlier this week, Americans celebrated one of their most meaningful holidays, their country’s Independence Day. It’s a day every American knows, a day spent with food, family, and fireworks. See Also: Why the American Revolution Was Really an Economic Revolution But, many Americans don’t know the real story that led to July 4, 1776. What […]
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared at the Washington Post. The author, Emily Ekins, will be joining Learn Liberty on Facebook Live this upcoming Thursday the the 30th at 3pm to talk about this and other election issues. Millennials are the only age group in America in which a majority views socialism favorably. A national […]
Russia has been cracking down on its internal dissent, limiting speech that does not coincide with the government’s narrow and controversial policies. Last year, up to 54 people were sent to prison for hate speech, marking a dramatic five-fold increase from five years ago. Take Anastasia Bubeyeva, for example. Bubeyeva now lives alone with her […]
We all know government debt is bad for the young. But it’s also bad for the poor. Hurting the Kids to Help the Elderly The well-known political philosopher Loren Lomasky recently reminded us of why debt is bad for the young. We might be able to justify spending now, and borrowing to finance the spending, […]
Editor’s note: This blog post by Gary Leff was originally posted at the travel blog View From the Wing. The TSA has failed to meaningfully detect dangerous items going through the checkpoint for years. Their 95 percent failure rate is hardly new, ten years ago it was a 91% failure rate. That’s unacceptable. We don’t need […]
It would not be remarkable to observe that politicians lie. Many people lie. What is remarkable is that politicians keep telling the same lies over and over again. Few people do this. (Donald Trump, who tells a new lie almost every time he opens his mouth, is not a counterexample to this observation because he […]
Many public intellectuals and political pundits were surprised by Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the Republican nomination. In my opinion, this is because they succumbed to what has (unfairly) become known as the “Pauline Kael syndrome.” Pauline Kael is the New Yorker critic who was reputed to have remarked after the 1972 Presidential election that “Nixon […]
Editor’s Note: This is part one in a two part series from Sarah Skwire on women and liberty. You can read part two here. I’ve been a feminist for as long as I can remember. One of our oldest family stories is of Young Sarah asking Mom why Puppy Chow had a commercial that said “Don’t […]
The term “pluralism” connotes both a description of our deep differences and a political response to those differences. Let’s start with pluralism as a description of our cultural reality. Our society is incredibly diverse when it comes to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, and sexuality. We have different life experiences, we live in different communities, […]
A recent piece in The New York Times Magazine explores the world of Minecraft and how children interact with the game. Minecraft is a game which allows players to build complex creations in a virtual world, either on their own or in shared spaces with other players. The gameplay combines a number of different elements: […]
Sunday is Loyalty Day, which celebrates loyalty, responsibility…and subservience to the country. That’s right—Loyalty Day is a day set aside as a time for the “reaffirmation of loyalty to America.” A little creepy, right? Many Americans are rightly proud of their country and loyal to it—up to a point. Loyalty Day gives us the opportunity […]
The Supreme Court is currently considering the legality of President Obama’s executive action on immigration that grants legal status to an estimated four million undocumented immigrants who have children who are U.S. citizens and no criminal record. The debate has divided those who love liberty, because while the policy—ending forced deportations of upstanding parents of […]
What does the hit HBO series Game of Thrones tell us about political science and the incentives faced by people in positions of power? Professor Matt McCaffrey explains in the following Learn Liberty video.
“That, gentlemen, is freedom.”So spoke an esteemed friend and mentor to me, decades ago, on listening to clarinetist Edmund Hall play an effortlessly glorious solo on the Louis Armstrong record Ambassador Satch. “What could he mean?” I wondered. “What has making music to do with freedom?” He did not explain.I now believe what my friend […]
Editor’s note: This blog post contains descriptions of rape and sexual assault. Reader’s discretion is advised. I lived in Erlangen, Germany for much of 2009, getting around on a bicycle. After the big April beer festival, the “Bergkirchweih,” my lock was cut and my bike was thrown down a hill and set on fire (it […]
The Red Rising trilogy is a “must read” for those who follow young adult dystopias, dystopian fiction in general, and contemporary science fiction, as well as those interested in “big idea” fiction about individualism and liberty. Red Rising owes a debt to many science fiction works that came before it, from Frank Herbert’s Dune and […]
Wing-walking was the practice of getting out of the cockpit of a biplane (while someone else was flying the thing) and staggering along the wing holding onto struts or wires. It was a thrill show for onlookers at air shows and barnstorming events in the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S. But for the wing-walker […]
The government “smoking police” are at it again. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently proposed a rule that will force more than 3,100 housing agencies in the United Sates to become smoke-free. Specifically, the regulation will prohibit “lit cigarettes, cigars and pipes in all living units, indoor common areas, administrative offices and […]