The TSA’s Gingerbread Man
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has long turned a deaf ear to criticism and complaints. Whenever its groping of toddlers sets the country howling, the TSA responds that employees...
About: Becky Akers
Posts by Becky Akers
OWS: Overlooking Corporatism’s Silent Partner
"Occupy Wall Street” has become something of a Rorschach test: observers find in it whatever they want to. If you consider protests a left-wing remnant from the turbulent 1960s,...
We All Have Something to Hide
Apologists for the State often excuse its surveillance by claiming that those who’ve done nothing wrong have nothing to hide. This implies that only criminals object to Leviathan’s all-seeing...
The Moral Market Provides
A church I visited recently announced a seminar for “financial professionals” who lament their industry’s “fallen ethics.” In 2009, USA Today reported that “the top Roman Catholic bishop in the...
Fumbling Freedom at the NFL
I’m not much of a football fan. In fact, we can broaden that to say I loathe every sport but Scrabble. If the entertainment involves chasing a ball, count...
Fair-weather Politicians
It’s tough to feel sorry for a billionaire who’s also a powerful politician, but once in a rare while I almost manage it. And then my sympathies extend not...
The American Church and State: Cozy Comrades
Communists have warred against Christians since Lenin and Trotsky first imposed Karl Marx’s horrific nonsense on reality. Whether it was the Soviet Union’s exiling of converts to mental hospitals...
Manufacturing Monsters to Mash
Civil libertarians pitched their usual fit last week over the revelation that the NYPD is collaborating with the CIA to spy on New Yorkers — and folks living, working, or...
Administrative Law: The Second Set of Books
At 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday in June, Thomas James Ball of Holden, Massachusetts (left), drenched himself with gasoline and struck a match. He burned to death at the...
“Fair” Taxation
Pretend you’re at church for Morning Worship, or attending a crowded lecture, or watching Hollywood’s latest with a few hundred other fans. Suddenly, a SWAT team breaks down the...
Leviathan’s Laws: The Insanity of New York City Housing
I’ll be the first to agree that politicians and bureaucrats have no principles. But government itself does; like other entities, it operates according to certain precepts. We who loathe...
Why Don’t BDO’s Stop Screeners from Robbing Us?
On a single day last month, a screener at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport helped herself to $100 in cash from a 16-year-old passenger’s bag while another...
Bobby Franklin, Liberty’s Hero
I was researching REAL ID, the Feds’ scheme to turn driver’s licenses into a national ID, when I stumbled across this bombshell at the National Motorists Association: Eliminate the...
Liars to the Left of Us
Watching DC’s spendthrifts and Keynesians try to resolve the nation’s catastrophic debt is like watching witch doctors try to cure cancer: We know the patient’s gonna die, and painfully,...
Legal Abracadabra: Why the TSA’s Sexual Assaults Are “Constitutional”
If you aren’t already convinced that judicial robes cloak the biggest set of fools and tyrants outside Congress, a decision last week from the DC Court of Appeals should...