For over 70 years, China has been subject to one-party rule under the unashamedly authoritarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While the exact nature of Chinese communist ideology has shifted over time under various leaders, Chinese citizens have been extremely limited in their personal freedom. During the era of Mao Zedong, from 1949 until his death in 1976, China faced a series of humanitarian catastrophes caused by disastrous policies of central planning. The collectivization policies implemented as part of the so-called “Great Leap Forward,” the second of the CCP’s five year plans, created ..read more

In Vietnam, a new regulation will take effect by January 2024 requiring all social media users to verify their identities in order to use online platforms. “Unverified accounts, no matter on local or foreign platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, will be dealt with,” declared Nguyen Thanh Lam, Vietnam’s Deputy Minister of Information and Communications. This move is a blatant violation of the right to free expression and privacy.  Under the new law, social media users will be required to divulge personal information, including their real names, government identification numbers, and ..read more

Author’s note: The book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen was assigned to me during my senior year of high school. I still reflect on its lessons and have found them applicable not just to the past, but, in some cases, to the future. The book analyzes 18 different U.S. history textbooks and is scathing in its assessment. As stated on the back cover: “Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these [text]books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past … From the truth about Columbu ..read more

The topic of school choice policies continues to be a subject of ongoing debate, with varying perspectives on how best to approach the issue. Aside from the opposition of groups invested in the status quo, pro-school choice reformers disagree about how to design choice policies and the role of the federal government. Any policy that empowers parents with more educational options beyond their assigned school district is an improvement over the status quo, which is plagued by runaway spending and flat, mediocre performance. But not every policy will produce the transformative innovation our syst ..read more

‘In memory of Karl Hess,’ reads the opening page of the 2011 essay collection Markets Not Capitalism, edited by Charles Johnson and Gary Chartier. On a surface level, it might seem odd to find a dedication to Hess — a primary author of the Republican Party’s early 1960s platforms who had earlier been involved in the launch of William F. Buckley’s National Review — in a left-leaning anarchist book that rails against “bosses, inequality, corporate power, and structural poverty.”  But then, Hess is a figure whose political journey was more complex and revelatory than most. The journey of Kar ..read more

Call me cynical, but sweeping new restrictions on vaping products announced alongside an increase to tobacco excise tax is not about public health.  Australia’s increasingly authoritarian and out-of-touch attitude to enforcement of public health measures has struck again, this time in the form of sweeping new restrictions on e-cigarette products. This is despite the fact that vaping is widely recognised as being safer than tobacco cigarettes, while also being credited with helping smokers quit the habit.  Now, Australia’s new ban on single use and non-prescription ‘vapes’ will stretc ..read more

John Stuart Mill was born 217 years ago, on May 21, 1806, and is remembered as one of the most foundational classical liberal philosophers and political economists to this day. If you’ve studied Mill at all in your college classes, you probably remember him for his development of utilitarian thought—the idea that anything we do should bring about “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” and that good moral behavior is the best way to achieve happiness for as many people as possible. A moral system is only good, argued Mill, if it can accomplish this end. Mill was also a huge ..read more

Would you tell a lie to protect someone from harm? Would you sign off on torture to prevent a bomb attack? If you want to look into the ethical aspects of personal and political decisions, you need to start with the basics, and one of the most basic ideas in moral philosophy is the distinction between consequentialism and deontology. These two schools of ethics identify different aspects of decisions as morally important, and lead to very different ways of looking at ethical issues — including freedom and liberty. Consequentialism Consequentialism tells us to judge decisions by the goodness of ..read more

Diandra Toyos claims that she and her children were nearly victims of human trafficking. In a Facebook post that quickly went viral, she wrote of a recent visit to her local Ikea with her three children: “I noticed a well dressed, middle aged man circling the area, getting closer to me and the kids. At one point he came right up to me and the boys, and instinctively I put myself between he and my mobile son. I had a bad feeling. He continued to circle the area, staring at the kids.” Continuing: “Something was off. We knew it in our gut. I am almost sure that we were the targets of human traffi ..read more