Stories

A lack of transparency surrounding subsidies from the  Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) casts a dark shadow on the government agency. As Tom Gantert of Michigan Capital Confidential reports, in 2016 the Great Lakes State will dole out more than $1 billion in subsidies to private businesses. Yet, the MEDC, which “oversees the state’s corporate […]

Five years after South Sudan’s founding, its conditions are arguably worse than those that initially led Americans to push for the territory’s independence from Sudan. Reflecting on the situation for The Boston Globe, Stephen Kinzer writes about how a coalition of Americans, which included Christians, human rights activists, the Congressional Black Caucus, and movie stars, […]

Drones will soon deliver medicine and blood to remote areas in Maryland, Nevada, and Washington. California-based company Zipline, which began operations in Rwanda in July, is looking to equalize health outcomes in rural areas of the United States. Amar Toor, writing for The Verge, reports that following Zipline’s partnership with Rwanda, the White House expressed […]

The editorial board of The Florida Times-Union calls out the Florida justice system for failing to accomplish what states like Texas and Georgia have realized through reform. In response to the Florida TaxWatch’s report on how to lower the state’s recidivism rate, the board supports the report’s recommendations, such as expanding vocational and educational programs, […]

Incarceration not only affects the offenders but also their families and communities. Gene Mills and Pat Nolan argue for reform in The Advertiser after viewing the negative effects children experience when they have incarcerated fathers. Around 2.5 million children nationwide and 94,000 children in Louisiana have had at least one parent incarcerated in their lifetimes, […]

Despite the size of the  U.S. domestic arms export industry, arms sales receive very little media attention. Reporting on the cronyism within the industry for The American Conservative, William Hartung writes that “the U.S. share has fluctuated between one-third and one-half of the global market for the past two decades.” Additionally, in 2011 70 percent […]

The United States has led a successful effort to grant United Nations accreditation to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom organization. CPJ’s U.N. accreditation effort stalled in May when a subcommittee to the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council, which is responsible for accrediting nongovernmental agencies, turned down CPJ’s request after four years of […]

Mandatory minimum sentencing poses a real threat to both public safety and human dignity in the United States, increasing the risk of recidivism among nonviolent offenders and failing to give judges the ability to exert discretion in the context of a given case. Yet the human side of the criminal justice system is often neglected […]

Today we celebrate the 211th birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose seminal work Democracy in America stands out as one of the first classical liberal defenses of the American experience. In an op-ed for The Federalist, Craig DeRoche explains how Tocqueville’s writings on the criminal justice system in America are still relevant to today’s controversies. […]

In his latest column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, George Mason University professor Don Boudreaux brings up a very basic economic point: “The first act is not the full story.” “Experts” routinely ignore this point when proposing corporate welfare schemes. To illustrate this fact, Boudreaux examines the impact of trade on the domestic steel industry. “It’s true […]