Hornberger's Blog is a daily libertarian blog written by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of FFF.
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by Jacob G. Hornberger
The current controversy over U.S. foreign aid to Egypt highlights perfectly the moral bankruptcy of U.S. foreign policy and what such a policy has done to our nation.
For the past three decades, the U.S. government has been funneling billions of dollars to the military dictatorship in Egypt.
Notice the operative word in that sentence: dictatorship.
Why is that word important?
Because dictatorship ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Sometimes the adverse effects of the U.S. government’s pro-empire, pro-interventionist foreign policy take years to manifest, long after the original intervention that engendered them. By that time, many Americans will have forgotten about the original intervention, and statists can get them to believe that history begins with the adverse effects of the intervention rather than with the intervention itself.
A ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In a recent lecture to an undergraduate class at George Washington University, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Benanke, not surprisingly, blasted the gold standard and praised paper money and the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve. He said that it would be impractical to return to the gold standard and that the Federal Reserve is necessary to address economic crises.
Unfortunately, ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
A March 17 Washington Post editorial entitled “A Bad Decision on Egypt” criticizes a decision by U.S. officials to consider renewing foreign aid to Egypt, given that the Egyptian government is still prosecuting certain non-governmental political organizations for operating in violation of Egypt’s registration requirements.
After U.S. officials had threatened a cut off of the aid unless Egypt ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In an era of unrestrained federal spending and debt, one of the most ludicrous arguments made by statists is that reducing the military budget would be harmful to the economy. Their suggestion is that military spending is beneficial to the economy — that it creates jobs. Reducing military spending, they say, would result in laying off troops and downsizing ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Among the favorite mantras of conservatives is With freedom comes responsibility. They love to hurl it at liberals whenever they point to the disastrous failure of the welfare state. When liberals cry, Please, judge us by our good intentions, not by the actual results of our policies, conservatives respond, No, good intentions mean nothing. What matters is the damage ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
For two years in a row — 2010 and 2011, The Future of Freedom Foundation participated in the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. Ordinarily, we would never do something like that, given how ardently conservatives support such things as foreign interventionism, militarism, empire, undeclared wars, wars of aggression, torture, the war on terrorism, and the denigration of ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Given all the talk about the possibility of President Obama initiating another war of aggression, this one against Iran, now would be a good time to review the illegality of such an operation, a point that will likely be forgotten once the standard war fever and warped sense of patriotism hits the media and the mainstream public. Under our ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Ironically, while the U.S. military is grappling with the cold-blooded killing of 16 Afghans, including women and children, the Guatemalan people are dealing with a military massacre of their own. A Guatemalan court has just sentenced a former member of Guatemala’s special forces, Pedro Pimental Rios, to a jail term of 6,060 years.
Pimental was convicted of participating in a ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
How ironic. Countless American Christians supported the U.S. government’s war of aggression on Iraq, and now consider this headline from last Sunday’sNew York Times: “Exodus from North Signals Iraqi Christians’ Slow Decline.”
And now we learn that an American soldier went on a killing rampage in Afghanistan, walking into people’s homes in a brutal shoot-up that ended up killing 16 people, ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
The pro-empire crowd sometimes claims that the U.S. Empire is different from other empires in history in that it doesn’t try to acquire foreign lands. They fail to grasp the real nature of the U.S. Empire. It isn’t about acquiring foreign lands, it’s about acquiring control over foreign regimes. And its model is based pretty much on how the ...
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Today’s Los Angeles Times has an interesting editorial on the Lynne Stewart case. Stewart is a 72-year-old criminal defense lawyer from New York who is now serving a 10-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. She was convicted in 2005 of supporting terrorism, an offense that arose during her defense of Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Islamic cleric known as the “blind ...