“It’s like we created another industry in our state. The amount of money is staggering,” Andrew Schaufele, director of Maryland’s Bureau of Revenue Estimates, happily declared last week. The Biden stimulus plan is deluging governments across America with hundreds of billions of dollars of extra revenue that will allow politicians to stretch their power in ways that vex citizens long after the pandemic is over. One year ago writing for AIER, I asked, “Will the Political Class Be Held Liable For...

It is with great personal sadness and a profound realization of the intellectual loss to the cause of liberty that I announce the death of our dear friend Robert Wenzel, publisher of the Economic Policy Journal and Target Liberty. Robert Wenzel's two outlets, for the many in the know, were among the first websites to visit each and every morning. His Target Liberty was as eclectic and iconoclastic (when it comes to the statist status quo) as it was didactic and, yes, even entertaining. Every...

On April 1, 1933, shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis staged a boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. Members of the Storm Troopers (“die Sturmabteilung,” or the “Storm Department,” as I like to think of them) stood around outside of Jewish-owned stores with Gothic-lettered placards reading “Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!” The boycott itself was a total disaster — most Germans ignored it and just went on with their lives — but it was the beginning of...

“Truth will out” is the most popular fairy tale in Washington. Members of Congress are clashing over whether politicians will appoint an “independent” commission to reveal the facts behind the January 6 Capitol ruckus. Proponents are portraying the issue as a simple choice between “truth or Trump.” Recent history provides no reason to expect a politically controlled process to expose facts that undermine powerful politicians. Congress has long been worse than useless as a fact-finding agency....

Journalist Abby MartinWe have been discussing the state laws requiring contractors and employees to swear that they do not support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (“BDS”) movement against Israel. I have long maintained that the law is unconstitutional as a limitation of free speech and associational rights. This week, a court in Georgia became the latest to declare such laws unconstitutional. The case was brought by journalist Abby Martin who was denied a contract as a keynote speaker at...

In the post-vaccination era, why don’t people remove their masks? Learned helplessness, employed as a control tool. Learned helplessness is well-documented. It takes place when an individual believes he continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and stops trying to improve his circumstances, even when he has the ability to do so. Discovering the loss of control elicits a passive reaction to a harmful situation. Psychologists call this a maladaptive response, characterized by...

In March, Governor Greg Abbott announced that Texas would open for business 100 percent without a statewide mask mandate. The pro-lockdown “experts” were shocked. If a state as big as Texas joined Florida and succeeded in thumbing its nose at “the science” – which told us that for the first time in history healthy people should be forced to stay in their houses and wear oxygen-restricting face masks – then the lockdown narrative would begin falling apart.President Biden famously attacked the...

The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) is altering its practices of data logging and testing for “Covid19” in order to make it seem the experimental gene-therapy “vaccines” are effective at preventing the alleged disease. They made no secret of this, announcing the policy changes on their website in late April/early May, (though naturally without admitting the fairly obvious motivation behind the change). The trick is in their reporting of what they call “breakthrough infections” – that is...

The full extent of Western meddling in Belarus prior to the country’s contested August 2020 election may never be known. Yet the outlines of a wide-ranging foreign effort to destabilize the government are becoming ever clearer. As RT reported earlier this week, a pair of Russian pranksters posing as Belarusian opposition figures have duped high-ranking representatives of US regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) into exposing the extent of Washington’s clandestine...

We have all been born and raised under a government that wields the power of assassination. State-sponsored assassinations at the hands of the US government — and specifically the Pentagon and the CIA — have become a rather ho-hum affair. They have become fully accepted as part and parcel of American life. Yet, when we stop to reflect on this phenomenon, we can’t help but come to the realization that this is truly an extraordinary power. It is an omnipotent power that enables the federal...

In an effort to ‘break up the status quo’ in the press corps, Mayor Lori Lightfoot banned reporters, based on their skin color, from conducting interviews with her. Lightfoot has abused her powers before the people. The sheer audacity of the US progressives, who have been on a crusade to stamp out any and all manifestations of ‘systemic racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ in the United States, could not have prepared anyone for the shocking display of bigotry committed by none other than the leader...

If you want to participate in Oregon society without being forced to wear a mask, you better have your paperwork in order. The state is now requiring individuals to display “proof of vaccination” if they’d like to take their masks off indoors, Oregon’s Health Authority has announced. Fully vaccinated people in Oregon will have to show proof of their vaccination status in order to enter businesses and other facilities without a mask. Businesses who don't check vaccination status will need to...

It's official. Children are less at risk of serious illness from COVID than literally any other ailment that afflicts them, yet they are the last people our government is setting free from the clutches of COVID tyranny. We have always known that children tend to get less sick from COVID than from a seasonal flu. But two new studies from California demonstrate that the risk is even lower than previously thought. Yesterday, New York magazine published a story highlighting new studies showing...

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott said in an interview this week with host Bill Hemmer at Fox News that Abbott has not yet received an apology from United States President Joe Biden for some negative things Biden said when Abbott on March 2 announced the ending of state-level coronavirus-related mandates in Texas. Maybe it would be nice for Biden to give Abbott a conciliatory call. But more important than this squabble between big-shot politicians, how about Abbott apologize to the people of Texas...

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford It never fails. Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again. In the same week that the US Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration...

At what point does a democracy become a kleptocracy? That type of degeneration routinely happens in Third World regimes but the same blight can occur in the United States. Few things epitomize “governing as looting” like the automated traffic ticket cameras that hundreds of local governments have inflicted on drivers across the nation. In 2015, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down St. Louis’s red light camera ticket regime for violating the US Constitution because drivers were forced to...