The world can be a luckless place, but every now and then serendipity just knocks you off a cliff. In what passed for my real life before TomDispatch intervened, I was (and remain, on a part-time basis) a book editor in mainstream publishing. The “slush pile” in a...
On a recent trip to Washington, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid down the law: America must threaten the Iranians with war if Tehran insists on pursuing its nuclear energy program. We are supposed to take seriously Netanyahu’s threats to strike Iran...
Much has been written about The Hunger Games and many of the underlying libertarian themes in that story. Jeffrey Tucker recently described the similarity between the fictional games and voting. Brent Railey noted just the other day the realities of the black market...
Some of us pause on Good Friday to mark the torture and death of a high-value detainee rendered, extraordinarily, to Roman occupiers. Although the charges against Jesus of Nazareth were trumped up, the Romans decided to err on the safe side by going to the "dark...
Dear Ron, A lot of my readers are big fans of yours: on those rare but pungent occasions when I have criticized you, I've gotten lots of "blowback" in the comments section and in emails sent directly to my inbox. Whenever I praised you, I've enjoyed a...
Americans who despair of Washington ever cutting waste from its trillion dollar defense/homeland security budget can take heart from pollster Scott Rasmussen’s book The People’s Money. The author argues that the public is always ahead of the politicians and that the...
So many government efforts run aground on problems with poor incentives. When the U.S. government intervenes overseas, those poor incentives are compounded by trying to impose Western values and institutions, usually by force, on peoples with starkly different...
