Displaying items by tag: liberty

In the early days of the state-level movement to legalize marijuana, we often got opposition from a surprising camp — libertarians.

North Carolina’s Supreme Court has been attracting negative attention in recent weeks. Its Democratic justices stand accused of plotting to boot two Republican colleagues from an important case dealing with voter ID.

When it comes to protecting economic liberty, North Carolinians get good help from their state constitution and state Supreme Court precedent. The Tar Heel State fares well in comparison with other states. But that could change.

Spring is an excellent time to remember North Carolina’s history, culture, and individual liberty. Most North Carolina history students know the Halifax Resolves’ significance, signed April 12, 1776, to make us the first colony to direct its members of the Continental Congress to vote for independence. Some know the significance of May 20, 1775, and the passing of the Mecklenburg Declaration. However, most people skip over April 6 and that day’s importance in our state and nation’s foundations.

In 1943, as collectivist policies were ascendant, an extraordinary thing happened. Three women published three books that year that would jolt Americans from their socialist stupor and remind them of the fundamental American values of individual liberty, limited government, free-market capitalism, and entrepreneurship. This Women’s History Month is an ideal time to reflect on how Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand helped to catalyze the 20th century libertarian movement.

Feb. 8 marks the silver anniversary of an iconic early manifesto defending the Internet as a space where personal liberties and social cooperation might flourish free of political control ... just in time. John Perry Barlow emailed "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" from the World Economic Forum the day Bill Clinton signed into law restraints on free expression via the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Thumbing through my third-grade son’s school materials for a lesson on voting and democracy, I was struck by something that years, maybe even months, earlier would have shocked me, but now seems unfortunately the sign of the times.

The political hysteria unleashed by last week’s clash at the Capitol between police and Trump protestors poses a growing danger to Americans’ constitutional rights.

The COVID pandemic this year has profoundly transformed the relationship of government to American citizens. Constitutional leashes have been obliterated as state and local politicians and officials have issued endless decrees that were vastly more effective at destroying freedom than at curbing a virus. And the Biden administration may soon take further leaps towards making our political system into a Cage Keeper Democracy where citizens’ ballots merely designate who will place them under house arrest. 

Recently, I told my wife that the 2020 election follies made me think of John Milton. She commented that I may have been the only one in America to make that connection to the second most important author in the English language, after Shakespeare, best known for his poetry. After all, very little of this year’s politics has been poetic (though it could be argued to fit somewhere in Paradise Lost). I was thinking of Milton’s prose.