10 years ago
May 2014
“Several scholars have identified a confluence of human-trafficking discourse with calls for restrictions on immigration. The new panic has also given rise to new agencies within municipal and state governments whose charge to prosecute ‘traffickers’ has resulted in the prosecution of greater numbers of women voluntarily selling sex for money. In Florida, the state legislature is considering a bill that would allow involuntary psychiatric hospitalization of sex-trafficking ‘victims.'”
Thaddeus Russell
“Sex Slaves and the Surveillance State”
“In January, the federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency charged by Congress with advising the president on the privacy and civil liberties repercussions relating to fighting terrorism, concluded that the NSA’s domestic surveillance ‘implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value.’ How limited? ‘We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.’ The oversight board recommended that the surveillance program be terminated.”
Ronald Bailey
“The Menace of Secret Government”
15 years ago
May 2009
“Budget gaps are a kind of Ponzi scheme. Any year the federal government spends more money than it collects in tax revenue, we have a budget deficit. That means the citizens through their taxes authorize politicians to spend a certain amount yet the government spends more. The plan is to pay this additional spending back with future taxes, just as Bernard Madoff figured he’d pay off early investors with dollars from pigeons he conned down the road. As with any Ponzi scheme, there will inevitably come a time when the con is exposed, along with all the participants’ losses.”
Veronique de Rugy
“When Do Deficits Matter?”
“Barack Obama promises to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by January. But the policy the prison has come to symbolize, indefinite military detention of terrorism suspects, is likely to continue. The form it takes will tell us a lot about the strength of Obama’s avowed commitment to protecting civil liberties.”
Jacob Sullum
“The Indefinite Future of Indefinite Detention”
25 years ago
May 1999
“In the warped vision of federal prosecutors, only their brand of witness tampering is compatible with proving the truth and assuring that justice is done. Under existing law, only prosecutors have unfettered power to decide what testimony is worth buying and how much the public should pay for it in the form of immunity, money, and liberty. Only prosecutors have the power to threaten and actually prosecute witnesses who insist that the facts do not conform with the government’s version of the truth. When prosecutors have so much power to influence evidence through rewards and intimidation, the danger they pose to truth and justice is clear.”
Harvey Silverglate and Andrew Good
“Starr Teachers”
45 years ago
May 1979
“The Carter administration is now reaping the consequences of blatantly inflationary policies, and no graceful exit seems possible. If inflation continues to roar along at 9 or 10 percent, fueled by a reversion to sloppy monetary policy, people and firms will be eager to borrow and reluctant to save, putting pressure on nominal interest rates. In this situation, selective credit controls might be sold as a snake oil remedy for high interest rates or inflation. Never mind, for the moment, that selective credit controls can’t have any such effect.”
Alan reynolds
“The Specter of Credit Controls”
55 years ago
May 1969
“Numerous [university] administrators and professors have displayed shocked disbelief at the ‘activists’ escalating vulgarity and cruelty. But they have no right to be shocked. For universities themselves are in part responsible for laying the roadbed for coercion. The college president who sadly shakes his head and mumbles that he cannot understand what motivates the protestors is like that kind of parent who, after doing everything possible in a span of two decades to destroy his child’s mind, laments to the world that the child refuses to think for himself. Well, what was expected?”
Lanny Friedlander
“No One To Stop Them”
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