The American Spectator reposted online this morning a piece I wrote for them 13 years ago on the proliferation of government surveillance. I included some of this in my 2000 book, Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years. If memory serves, reviewers denounced my paranoia on surveillance issue […]
From the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s Future of Freedom magazine – THE CONTINUING FORFEITURE SCOURGE by James Bovard A federal crime wave is sweeping the nation, and prosecutors and G-men could not be happier about it. The Wall Street Journal reported that government “forfeiture programs confiscated homes, cars, boats, and cash in more than 15,000 cases [in 2010]. […]
Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2013 A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting One survey found that 75% of IRS respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie to Congress. By JAMES BOVARD Many Republicans are enraged over revelations in recent days that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups with a campaign of audits […]
Washington Times, May 13, 2003 BOVARD: Dancing to the beat of the grapevine The raisin famers seek servitude liberation Does the secretary of agriculture need unlimited power over farmers to protect them against themselves? The Supreme Court might finally settle this issue in an imminent decision on one of USDA’s most bizarre regimes. When […]
Friedrich Hayek was born this day in 1899. Hayek had a huge influence on the development of my political thinking. I learned about Hayek’s existence when William F. Buckley spoke at Virginia Tech and touted the Austrian economist’s opposition to the Welfare State. I zipped to the bookstore the next morning and snared Hayek’s 1944 […]
Congress is finally paying attention to the choking profusion of federal criminal laws. The House Committee on the Judiciary Over-Criminalization Task Force of 2013 will be launched this week, seeking to pare back the federal criminal code. The Wall Street Journal, which has had an excellent series of reports on this problem in recent years, notes, […]
This month is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bruno Leoni, one of the most penetrating political thinkers of the post-World War Two era. His 1961 book, Freedom and the Law, helped me get a handle on the perils of majority rule. (E-text versions of that book are available free from the Liberty Fund […]
