The situation certainly doesn’t look good. The U.S. welfare-warfare state is more entrenched than ever. Federal spending continues to soar. The national debt continues to mount. The Federal Reserve is cranking up the inflationary printing presses. Taxes continue to rise. The drug war keeps ruining lives. The regulated economy keeps suppressing economic vitality. We now live in a country in which the ruler has the omnipotent, dictatorial power to round up people, cart them away to concentration camps, torture them, and even execute them as suspected terrorists. And with Barack Obama’s reelection, we will undoubtedly see more Americans and countless foreigners assassinated.
So, what are we going to do about it? Well, I’ll tell you: We’re going to fight. We’re going to fight harder than ever. If freedom were easy, everyone in history would have known what it was like to live in a free society. The quest to achieve freedom is one of the most difficult endeavors that people can ever undertake. It takes commitment, passion, knowledge, and fierce determination. It takes a spirit that refuses to rest until principles are triumphant.
How do we prevail? Through the power of ideas! Ideas on liberty can change people’s lives; they can change the course of a nation. Our job is to present the uncompromising moral, philosophical, and economic case for the free society. We put the ideas out there in the marketplace with the expectation of finding people who are interested in libertarianism, who want to educate themselves on the freedom philosophy, and who will influence others to join our cause.
We have had an exciting and productive year here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, and with your support 2013 promises to be just as successful. Consider these highlights:
Our New Website: Our greatly anticipated new website (www.fff.org) has launched! You’ll immediately see our new dynamic home page. We’re especially pleased with our new search capabilities, which will enable people to easily find both the thousands of FFF articles we have published since our inception 23 years ago and libertarian articles on the Internet that we have included in our FFF Daily. We hope you are as pleased with our new website as we are. Thank you for helping bring it to fruition.
Sheldon Richman: We have a brand new full-time staff member — Sheldon Richman, who has come on board as vice president of FFF and editor of our monthly journal, Future of Freedom. Given his 15 years of experience at the Foundation for Economic Education as editor of The Freeman and, before that, his 5 years as senior editor at the Cato Institute, Sheldon brings a depth of knowledge, competence, passion, and commitment that is unmatched in the libertarian movement. In addition to the op-eds he will continue writing that we send to newspapers all across the country, he is bringing his highly acclaimed “The Goal Is Freedom” (TGIF) column to FFF. Also on the drawing board are webinars for students covering both substantive and practical issues, such as showing students how to write op-eds. Sheldon will also be periodically writing short e-books on major libertarian issues to acquaint people with fundamental and timeless libertarian principles.
College Civil Liberties Tours: We have conducted two major College Civil Liberties Tours, in partnership with the Young Americans for Liberty. They were awesome! Going on the road to college campuses in the Northeast and then out West, we were able to raise the vision of hundreds of young people to the critical importance of civil liberties, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights and to the horrible damage that militarism, foreign interventionism, and imperialism are doing to our land and our economy. Technology and the Internet have enabled us to share those important programs with people all over the world.
Economic Liberty Lecture Series: We continue our Economic Liberty Lecture Series, which we do with the George Mason University Econ Society, a student-run group imbued with a passion for libertarianism and Austrian economics. The program, which consists of pizza, a talk, q&a, and a social hour, has been absolutely fantastic. We live-stream the programs and then post them on our website.
GMU Seminar: I’m also conducting an informal law and economics seminar at GMU that is sponsored by the Econ Society. So far we’ve studied and discussed the Legal Tender Cases, the Gold Clause Cases, and the famous “liberty of contract” case, Lochner v. New York.
Evening with Peter Boettke: Next spring, we’re planning an evening program featuring GMU economics professor Peter Boettke, one of the world’s most knowledgeable proponents of Austrian economics. The program will feature a talk by Pete on his new book, Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, followed by comments by Sheldon Richman and a representative from the Independent Institute, which published the book. It will be held in Arlington, Virginia. We’ll keep you advised on the place and date. It will be open to the public with free admission. We’ll be live-streaming and video-taping it.
FFF Publications: Sheldon is taking over the reins of Future of Freedom, while Bart Frazier, FFF’s program manager, and I will continue putting together our FFF Daily email update. We will continue striving to make these two publications the best and most enjoyable to read in the libertarian movement. Also I hope you are enjoying my daily blog as much as I enjoy writing it!
Our work depends on you! We want to do more. We don’t want to just advance liberty; we want to achieve it. We just have to keep fighting! I hope our work has earned your support for the coming year.
Yours for liberty,
Jacob G. Hornberger
P.S. If you donate $250 or more, you become a member of our FFF Freedom Club, which receives a monthly Internet video message from me. We’ll also send you a special thank-you gift — an embroidered baseball cap — from FFF.
