Sheldon Richman Articles

TGIF: The Mythical Right to Medical Care

This clever video juxtaposes footage of Bernie Sanders and the late Milton Friedman to create a debate over whether the central government should take over medical care in America. Sanders condemns as a "national disgrace" the lack of a medical care guarantee for all...

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TGIF: Year-End Downers

One always hopes to end the year on a high note, but politically speaking, at least, that is difficult again in 2022. One searches in vain for advances in individual liberty and setbacks for power. Sure, with the receding of the pandemic, life has returned to normal...

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TGIF: The State Fuels Identity Politics

Anyone with an ounce of good sense knows that destructive identity politics is run amuck in America and elsewhere. All incentives these days seem to go in one direction: toward identifying oneself as a member of an aggrieved group supposedly due compensation through...

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TGIF: Why Freedom Is the Goal

In online interviews and conversations I'm hearing intellectuals in the national conservative movement say that the liberal Enlightenment "project" has mostly failed because people need more in their lives than freedom. I've also heard this from a few people who have...

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TGIF: On Liberty and Security

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Benjamin Franklin's famous words are often quoted because, alas, they are always relevant. Whether Franklin meant what libertarians take him to have...

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TGIF: Beware the Regulatory Storm over FTX

The bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the alleged fraud by co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, which has cost customers millions, is tailor-made for anyone who already wants the power of government to expand, especially in the area of financial privacy. For...

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TGIF: Midterm Blues

As midterm elections go, for champions of individual liberty this one could have been worse. I see two bright spots. The likely slim majority of Republicans in the House could -- maybe -- produce a measure of gridlock on domestic spending and regulation, and the blame...

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TGIF: Election Day 2022

Another election day is upon us. We're told that we have a duty to vote because so many Americans gave their lives for that right. But perhaps it ought to be spelled R-I-T-E, as in a religious ritual. Is it a duty or a right? Let's make up our minds. In 21 countries...

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TGIF: Free Markets and Greed

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." Ever since corporate raider Gordon Gekko, the lead character in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), made that declaration, left-wing opponents of the market economy have regarded that one-liner as the only rebuttal required...

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TGIF: Are Bosses like Rulers?

What does the libertarian philosophy have to say about business management as an institution? Is it analogous to the state or something entirely different? Since we libertarians generally dislike seeing people being bossed around, whether by the state or anyone else,...

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TGIF: The Scourge of Conscription

By now Randolph Bourne's observation that "war is the health of the state" ought to be such a cliche that it would hardly need to be said. And yet, it must be said -- often -- because many still haven't gotten the word. If the state is the adversary of liberty, as it...

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TGIF: Question Intuition!

In the 1960s a popular button that New Left activists wore implored everyone to "Question Authority!" It was good advice, even though many kinds of authority exist. Some authority is chosen (for example, one's doctor) and others are compulsory (the government). But in...

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Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

What Social Animal's Owe to Each Other

by Sheldon Richman

Book Animalssm

These essays, written over the past 20 years, have a single underlying theme: namely, that we human beings, as social animals, need individual freedom to fully flourish.

Coming to Palestine

by Sheldon Richman

In this incredible volume of essays, collected over 30 years, Sheldon Richman exposes the true history of Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians.