Next Wednesday night, I’ll be speaking at Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communication on whether we should end the Federal Reserve and, if so, what should replace it. (My short answers: yes; the free market.)

Get the details from America’s Future Foundation, which is sponsoring the event.

On the following two Mondays, I’ll be speaking to Federalist Society chapters in Seattle and North Dakota, respectively.

On Monday, April 9, at 12:30 p.m., I’ll speak at the University of Washington School of Law on “Why Progressives (and Everyone) Should Support Economic Liberty.”

On Monday, April 16, at 12 p.m., at the University of North Dakota School of Law, I’ll debate Professor Eric E. Johnson on whether law schools should have to be accredited and lawyers should have to be licensed.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Last night I was on Politics Tonight on CLTV, a Chicagoland cable channel, to briefly discuss what’s going on at the Supreme Court and why the ObamaCare mandate that everyone buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Here’s the video.

I just now saw that George Leef, book review editor for The Freeman, made a list of the top books reviewed in that publication in 2011.

Number one: Libertarianism Today.

By the way, the audio book is coming next month, read by a professional who has done a great job with it.

I wrote a brief summary of why the ObamaCare individual mandate violates the Constitution for the Illinois Policy Institute’s blog. Here’s what I said:

On Tuesday, March 27, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on the most controversial part of ObamaCare: the “individual mandate,” which requires that everyone not otherwise covered purchase government-approved health insurance.

The government claims that the individual mandate is constitutional because it falls under Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. In an amicus brief filed by the Illinois Policy Institute and like-minded organizations across the country, we argue that the law is far outside Congress’s constitutional authority and must be struck down.

Supreme Court decisions since the New Deal era have held that the Commerce Clause allows Congress to regulate virtually any human activity that affects commerce. For example, in the notorious case of Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Court decided that the federal government could penalize a farmer for growing wheat on his own land for his own personal use.Because Mr. Filburn grew his own wheat, he would buy less wheat from others, so the Court concluded that his actions affected the national market for wheat and were therefore subject to federal regulation.

Wickard was a gross abuse of the Commerce Clause.As Professor Randy Barnett has shown, in the founding era, “commerce” only referred to shipping and trade, and “regulate” meant “to make regular” – that is, to specify how an activity related to trade and shipping may be done. The Commerce Clause was never meant to allow regulation of all economic activity – but in the years since Wickard, that’s essentially what the Supreme Court has said.

Even so, the ObamaCare case is different from all cases that have come before, and the individual mandate should be struck down even if we accept (for the sake of argument) the Supreme Court’s decades of liberal precedents. Here, the government isn’t punishing an activity (like growing wheat); it’s punishing inactivity – people’s decision not to buy health insurance. The Supreme Court has never said that this is within Congress’s power.

In a sense, it’s true that people who decide not to buy insurance “affect” commerce: The markets for insurance and health care look at least slightly different than they would if those people decided to buy it.

The trouble is, if we accept that reasoning, it follows that Congress can force us to do virtually anything. When we choose to do a particular activity, we implicitly choose not to do the infinite other things we could be doing instead. By choosing not to do those things, we are, by the government’s logic, “affecting” commerce. And, by the government’s logic, the Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to force us to do any of those countless things we are choosing not to do. That means the government could force us to buy Chevy Volts or gym memberships, or could even force us to eat the foods it thinks are best.

That can’t be right. The Constitution’s framers intended the federal government to be one of limited, enumerated powers. If they had wanted to create the unlimited government that the Obama Administration seeks, the framers wouldn’t have given Congress just 18 specific powers, and they wouldn’t have made clear in the Tenth Amendment that all other governmental powers belong to the states.

So the ObamaCare case is important not just because of the huge harm the law would cause to people across Illinois and the nation; it’s important because the Court will have to decide whether the federal government will have any limits at all on its power in the 21st century.

As always, the views I express otherwise on this site are my own, not those of any organization.

Today Reason features a story by journalist Scott Reeder about the Liberty Justice Center’s case on behalf of a Bloomington, Illinois woman whose local government stopped her from opening her own vehicle-for-hire service. Here’s the preview:

Julie Crowe’s dream of starting her own business was stifled when a group of potential competitors pressured Bloomington City Hall not to give her a taxi license. In this small central-Illinois college town, Crowe perceived a need for the services she could provide driving drunken college students from downtown bars to dormitories, fraternities and sororities. Bloomington rejected Crowe’s request to add a 15-seat van to the city’s mix of cabs and buses after competitors said the market was saturated. While Crowe’s situation may seem unique, writes Scott Reeder, it’s a common predicament faced by folks wanting to enter the heavily regulated taxicab industry.

Read the whole thing.

In Libertarianism Today, I mention that Charles and David Koch are “to this day” the Cato Institute’s “foremost patrons.” This obviously isn’t true now that the Kochs are suing the Cato Institute to take control of it, and apparently it hasn’t been true for a while. According to Cato scholar Jerry Taylor, the Kochs gave no money to Cato last year and have contributed only about four percent of Cato’s revenues over the past decade.

So a correction is in order, and there you have it.

For the past six months, I have been working for the Liberty Justice Center, a new public-interest litigation center dedicated to advancing economic liberty. Here’s a short video on our first case, brought on behalf of a Bloomington, Illinois woman who was stopped from opening a vehicle-for-hire business based on nothing more than a city bureaucrat’s arbitrary command. The video tells our client’s story and explains why the licensing scheme we’re challenging — which resembles many others across the country — violates due process and makes no economic sense.

You can also read my article on the case from the Daily Caller and listen to a radio interview I did on the case with liberty-friendly Bloomington radio host Robert Rees.

Needless to say, the opinions I express on this website are my own and not necessarily those of any organization.

Do we need copyrights and patents?  I’ll argue that we don’t in a debate sponsored by the Federalist Society at Dayton Law School on Monday, February 27, at 12:30 p.m.  Taking the other side will be Professor Sam Han.

The event is free and open to the public.

In the Winter 2012 Independent Review, I review David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform. Here’s how it starts:

Few Supreme Court cases receive more scorn in U.S. law schools than Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45), the 1905 decision that struck down a New York law limiting the number of hours that bakers could work as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It’s safe to say that most legal academics and judges today believe that the Lochner Court engaged in extraordinarily outrageous “judicial activism” motivated by a devotion to extreme libertarian ideology, big business, or both.

In Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform, George Mason University law professor David Bernstein makes the case that the conventional view is wrong. He provides persuasive evidence that Lochner does not deserve to be singled out as an especially activist or offensive case and that Lochner’s Progressive critics were the real activists with a much more disturbing agenda.

Read the rest.