Executive Director, Tim O’Brien, a writer by profession, has been a frequent contributor of opinion columns to both the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, many of which have been reprinted by other newspapers throughout Michigan. Here is a collection of all these columns, covering a wide variety of topics and issues — in both “as submitted” and “as published” versions (for the full, no-holds-barred dissection the former is recommended.)
The column titled “An Important Day,” published by the Detroit News on July 3, 2001, recounting the circumstances surrounding the Declaration of Independence two and a quater centuries earlier, coincided with the formal launch of the Small Government Alliance. Our group’s Executive Director had at that time, however, already been contributing opinion columns to Michigan newspapers for several years. Those columns are also archived here.
Being a libertarian and an environmentalist (passionate though not a zealot about either) makes me -- within my customary, political circles -- something of a stranger in a strange [More...]
Shockwaves from the passage of Prop 14 in California are reverberating across the entire country, shaking political foundations and threatening to topple long-standing structures.
Called "Top Two," the election reform creates [More...]
The way we libertarians are always quoting the Founding Fathers it would be easy to mistake our admiration for veneration. Not so.
Now, we certainly are awed by their philosophical insights [More...]
Expect the tempest over "ObamaCare" to continue brewing in tea parties across the country. The one-party party in Washington, ostensibly to reduce the cost of health care services, ought to [More...]
If we libertarians had a patron saint, it would have to be Cassandra, the mythic Princess of Troy.
I’m sure that both liberals and conservatives would readily concur, having long regarded [More...]
As a lifelong libertarian and longtime Libertarian Party member I have stood above the mainstream fray between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. From gun owners' rights to women’s reproductive [More...]
Federal Reserve Board chairman, Ben Bernanke, announced in mid-March yet another cut in the key federal funds rate – the sixth in as many months – reducing the cost for major borrowers [More...]
“One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating [More...]
The 10 million of us Americans who call these pleasant peninsulas home recently received some very unpleasant news from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Ours was the only state [More...]
“He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could [More...]
It appears from the recent flurry of legislative proposals and blizzard of news reports that we have opened a new front in the War on Drugs.
“Meth” (the street name for [More...]
After a year of wrangling over how to help diversify Michigan’s economy, our visionary leaders in Lansing created a billion dollar, 21st Century Jobs Fund for investing in high-tech industries.
Unsurprisingly, [More...]
Ever since the switch to a "No-fault" divorce system made kids' chances of being raised by both parents a 50/50 proposition, child support collection has been a major growth industry [More...]
The obvious problem with any monopoly is the inevitable effect lack of competitive pressure has on both product quality and cost containment.
And so it is with our taxpayer-financed schools. For [More...]
There could be no more perfect example of why government should be kept entirely out of regulating the marketplace than a bill currently under consideration in Lansing.
HB-4959 was created at [More...]
As the state budgetary battle rages and cuts loom, higher education has formed a mutual defense pact with what has heretofore been referred to in Lansingspeak as “K-12” (i.e., kindergarten [More...]
Governor Granholm likes to quote a trendy, corporate cliché that encourages managers to approach problem solving by “thinking outside the box.” But her proposals to improve our state’s business climate [More...]
With the recent passing of Richard Headlee Michigan lost one of its true heroes.
A corporate leader often credited with taking the Alexander Hamilton Life Insurance Company from life-support to industry [More...]
Election season is hard upon us. So the half of us who vote must once again endure “civic duty’ haranguing along with the half who don’t.
Personally, I’d just as soon [More...]
Aside from having a keen sense of how to satisfy the whims of a fickle marketplace, what separates the successful businessperson from the rest of us is an especially canny [More...]
Despite what you may have been taught in high school civics, the genius in the creation of “Our American Government” was not merely that it is a representative democracy. The [More...]
Governor Granholm has now completed her second statewide tour seeking suggestions for specific cuts to eliminate the projected $920 million deficit from next year’s state budget. But this is a [More...]
For the past few years, Michigan seniors have organized regular trips into Canada to buy American-made medicines at substantially less than American-made prices. Now a Metro Detroit entrepreneur is attempting [More...]
With Senate Bill 395 the well-organized pro-life forces in the Michigan legislature hope to ban what they provocatively term “partial-birth abortion.” This procedure, properly called “Intact Dilation and Extraction,” is [More...]
Josef Stalin once said that “It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes.”
Officials in Detroit and Wayne County have gone him one [More...]
Referring to the limited powers of government enumerated in the newly adopted U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson once noted that "To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn [More...]
Detroit residents soon will have an opportunity to amend the city charter to make possession of marijuana for medical use the city’s lowest law enforcement priority, and entirely eliminate funding [More...]
As we celebrate our country's 225th birthday with pomp and circumstance, parades and picnics and fireworks, it's worth taking at least a few moments to reflect on some of [More...]
If there is one, universal, defining characteristic of politicians, it would have to be: covetousness.
Nothing drives a politician to distraction faster than the prospect that some money might be trading [More...]
The sound and fury continue over the problem of what self-proclaimed children's advocates used to alliterate "Deadbeat Dads," but have now politically corrected to the much less lyrical "Deadbeat [More...]
A group of Allen Park high schoolers got a wonderful, real-world lesson in how government works when they went on a field trip to a recent meeting of our [More...]
Last Friday, while the rest of the country continued the seemingly endless debate over which sixth of the population's votes actually reflected "the will of the people" in the [More...]
The Libertarian Party of Michigan has hit a small bump on the road to freedom. On November 27 the Secretary of State's office certified the results of the most [More...]
"Why should I swap one tyrant 3,000 miles away," asked Benjamin Martin, the fictional (and archetypically reluctant) American hero in the recent movie The Patriot, "for 3,000 tyrants one [More...]
When Michigan voters amended the state constitution in 1992 to limit the terms of most state-level elected officials there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among professional politicians and [More...]
Officials at the Taft Elementary School in Wyandotte announced a few weeks ago that they are considering a ban on Pokémon trading cards -- the latest fad among elementary school [More...]
Towards the end of the 18th century our forefathers, who had successfully ended rule by a hereditary monarchy and replaced it with a republican form of government, came up against [More...]
Libertarians are ringing in the new millennium with a rousing chorus of cheers for Brass Roots -- a Michigan gun rights organization founded by 1994 LP candidate for U.S. Senate, [More...]
The sentencing of Nate Abraham, the 13-year-old who shot and killed 18-year-old Ronnie Greene (apparently for nothing more than the sport of it) when Abraham was only 11, has prompted [More...]
In an effort to reduce violent crime in public housing the Detroit Housing Commission is going to participate in a federal "gun buyback" program that will give residents $50 for [More...]
Someone once observed that, when legislation is for sale, the first thing that will be bought and sold is legislators. It seems that everyone has finally come to realize that [More...]
There must be something seriously wrong with how we define our political spectrum if I can somehow have been moved from one end to the other while always standing in [More...]
Last month six state representatives (constituting a self-proclaimed "Task Force") convened the first of a promised series of public hearings on the status of the all but abandoned, former Veterans [More...]
On April 27 people in the Southgate school district will be forced to trudge to the polls for the fourth time in less than two years if they wish to [More...]
On September 8, 1925 Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family into their new two- story, brick home on the corner of Garland and Charlevoix on Detroit's east side.
A prominent and [More...]
In his final radio address of 1998 President Clinton called for new federal regulations requiring all fifty state governments to adopt a .08% blood-alcohol standard for drunk driving.
Since the 10th [More...]
I have long suspected that the marriage of convenience between religious-right and nanny-state conservatives must inevitably end in a messy divorce.
Other than a desire to achieve political power in order [More...]
Wayne county voters should take a moment to appreciate the range of candidates on the August 4th primary ballot before exercising their franchise. In the overwhelming majority of county-wide races [More...]
The very tolerant townsfolk of Ypsilanti recently voted against repealing an anti-discrimination ordinance enacted by the city council last year.
The reaffirmed measure bars discrimination in 14 areas, including race, height, [More...]
More than three years ago, I began voicing objections at my bi-monthly city council meetings to a Consent Decree entered into by my hometown of Allen Park (along with a [More...]
Delegates to the Libertarian Party of Michigan nominating convention in East Lansing last month selected "None Of The Above" as the party's candidate for Governor.
Though the party platform advocates including [More...]
A few weeks ago I found myself at the Tampa airport more than four hours ahead of the scheduled departure time for my return flight to Detroit.
After checking my luggage [More...]
Detroit police officers Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers have something in common with Malice Green -- the young man in whose death the two officers were convicted of second degree [More...]
More than 150 people in Michigan died last year while waiting for the organ transplant that might well have saved their lives.
As of New Year's Day this year there were [More...]
With more than 800,000 hunters stalking the Michigan woods this month we will be fielding a larger armed force than can be mustered by all but two nations on earth. [More...]
Damita Morton of Detroit was killed last month in a collision with a stolen car fleeing police. The 43-year-old mother of seven and grandmother of five was on her way [More...]
A group called Michigan Taxpayers United has filed suit to reverse the 30% increase in the state's gas tax enacted -- by 56 votes in the 110 member House -- [More...]
