property rights

Whatever economic freedom we enjoy in the world today is due, to a great extent, to the ideas and efforts of the classical liberals and economists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Most people assume government police are tasked with stopping robbers, but a little-known legal fiction effectively allows the cops to become the robbers.

The infamous Kelo decision which turned the “public use” clause of the 5th Amendment into a “public benefit or a revenue enhancement clause” is but a tip of a dangerous iceberg.

There are some people who simply, bizarrely do not like intellectual property. Some are full-blown Leftists – who do not like private property at all. (But don’t you dare try to take for the Collective the smart phone on which they’re Tweeting their disdain for private property.) Others are to varying degrees small “L” libertarian. Who somehow bizarrely delineate between physical property (which they’ll protect) and intellectual property (which they won’t). Who would have arrested a thief leaving Tower Records with an armful of CDs – but who is even as I type downloading-without-paying that exact same music.

While Scalia’s time serving on the Supreme Court influenced a wide range of issues, his critical analyses and carefully crafted opinions on environmental issues had an outsized impact on environmental policy and law. Scalia’s vote was often the difference between protecting individual liberty against attempts to expand government power and rulings that would have imposed the misanthropic wishes of radical environmentalists on the public.

In today’s edition of the Heartland Daily Podcast, Isaac Orr, Heartland Research Fellow for energy policy, joins H. Sterling Burnett to talk about his newly released study on the impact of frac sand mining – Social Impacts of Industrial Silica Sand (Frac Sand) Mining: Land Use and Value.