American Hawks Risk Escalating the Ukrainian Crisis
With Russia and the United States confronting each other over Ukraine, the world is at a dangerous juncture. ...
About: Sheldon Richman
Posts by Sheldon Richman
The Surveillance State Lives
President Obama has some nerve. He opened his speech on NSA spying by likening his surveillance regime to Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty. How insulting! They were...
The Kenyan Massacre’s Roots in America’s Somalia Policy
Last weekend’s hostage-taking — and the murder of at least 62 people — at the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, has its roots in the U.S. government’s intervention...
U.S. Has No Moral Standing to Condemn Assad
Whether or not Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, President Obama has no legitimate grounds to intervene. ...
Delete the Fed
Who should run the Federal Reserve System when chairman Ben Bernanke’s term expires next year? No one. ...
Stop-and-Frisk: How Government Creates Problems, Then Makes Them Worse
Two recent law-enforcement decisions illustrate yet again that when government sets out to solve a problem it created, things get much worse. ...
How to Help Fast-Food Workers
Doubling the minimum wage may seem like a good way to help fast-food workers, but it would hurt them instead. So what should we do? We must sweep away...
The Economics Lesson Obama Needs to Learn
President Obama is again turning his attention to the elusive economic recovery. His “pivot” will be for naught, however, as long as he continues to ignore two important points:...
Zimmerman Case Is No Grounds for Gun Control
From the beginning, people who would ban all private guns if they could have used the George Zimmerman case to push their agenda. ...
Big Brother, not Snowden and Greenwald, Is the Story
If the media spent half the time investigating Obama’s Big Brother operations that they spend sneering at Snowden and Greenwald, Americans might demand that the government stop spying on...
Motives Aside, the NSA Should Not Spy on Us
You need not suspect the motives of those responsible for NSA surveillance to detest what they are doing. In fact, we may have more to fear from spies acting...
Obama Speaks With Forked Tongue on Surveillance
The government’s response to Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency’s secret monitoring of the Internet and collection of our telephone logs is a mass of contradictions. ...
Bangladeshi Workers Need Freed Markets
A passionate debate now rages over whether international safety standards should be enforced against manufacturers in the developing world and their Western retailers. Unfortunately, the debate is unnecessarily narrow....
Abolish the IRS — and the Income Tax With It
Nothing will have been learned from this scandal if all that happens is the firing of some IRS administrators and the issuance of new guidelines on 501(c)(4) applications. That...
Gun-Control Demagogy
Demagogues offend us because they try to bypass our rational faculty with appeals to gut emotion. That pretty well sums up what gun controllers have done since the Newtown...