Thirty-one years ago today, a fire broke out in Waco and killed 76 people—including 25 children. This fire was not the result of a tragic accident or a homicidal arsonist, but rather the final act of 51-day siege by the FBI and ATF. The government investigated itself and cleared itself of wrongdoing. It determined that...
Stalin didn’t need warrants, but he would have wished for the U.S. government’s ability to buy American citizens’ data from data brokers. We lost the battle on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which federal agencies have used to surveil Americans without warrants, in the House of Representatives last week — barely. A group of liberty-minded...
The focus of parental choice has, rightly, been on parents and students. Students and parents—especially those without the means to move to better school districts, the luck to get into a charter school, or the ability to cut a check to a private school—are the ones who stand benefit the most from education savings accounts....
I survived Nazi occupation and the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia. I watched as the communists came into the schools, threw out the textbooks, and rewrote history. Every day, my father, a learned man and local leader, retaught me and my sister the true history of our country and heritage. Eventually, because my father would not...
“I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t see the speed limit,” has never been a legitimate legal defense. We might say it when we get pulled over, hoping for leniency, but it’s never been a real excuse. Ignorantia juris non excusat: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. That’s a doctrine almost as old as laws themselves....
“The death of one man is a great tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.” We don’t really know who first said this, but it’s often fittingly attributed to Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers in history. Due to the Soviet Union’s shoddy bookkeeping and dubious censuses, we’ll never know Stalin’s...
The Houston Chronicle recently broke the story on a special purpose district in Austin that’s discovered a way to manipulate the law in its favor—a manipulation that has generated the district, and its board members, millions of dollars in profits. Put simply, the SH130 Municipal Management District uses a tax workaround to exempt developers’ land...
You are not a fish. I am not a fish. We are not fish. And yet, our local governments sure do want to treat us like fish to be caught, either on a hook or with a net. Once caught, we stay caught. Right now, in Texas, there is no reasonable way for a group...
It can, it turns out, be done. Local governments can, in fact, be responsible with taxpayer funds without prompting from voters or the state government. That’s exactly what Hays County officials did with their new $354 million budget. Hays County adopted the no-new-revenue (NNR) tax rate, which drops the tax rate in proportion with property...
“That’s classified.” That’s a phrase we see often in movies, and a phrase we expect to hear from our government regarding military missions, special operations, and other national security issues. It’s not a phrase we expect to hear from our local and state governments regarding hiring decisions, spending, or other public business. And yet, that’s...
It’s common to see people on the Left throw the Nazi label at people on the Right—so common we’re almost desensitized to it. It’s something that has always frustrated me, primarily because it somehow implies that Nazism is the natural extension of the extreme Right. It’s not. Nazi is a shortening of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—National...
A draft of the city of Austin’s 2023 legislative priorities was released last week and already many people are sounding the alarm over its anti-taxpayer bent. For instance, in the just-published document, the city suggests using its taxpayer-funded lobby muscle to oppose legislation strengthening the voter-approval tax rate, fight against proposals to enact a local...