Free Society

The Many Ways Our Rights Have Been Usurped Since 9/11

by John W. Whitehead September 27, 2023

“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” — Abraham Lincoln Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, ...

The Next Crisis Is Anyone’s Guess, But the Government Is Ready to Lockdown the Nation

by John W. Whitehead September 19, 2023

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers. In ...

How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

by John W. Whitehead September 6, 2023

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman Ever ...

Macaulay and the Ghosts of Tyranny Past, Part 2

by James Bovard September 1, 2023

Part 1 | Part 2 Reposing with a favorite author in the Virginia Tech library in 1976, I savored one zinger after another in Thomas Macaulay’s History of England. Macaulay hailed the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 as “the most stringent curb that ever legislation imposed on tyranny,” a law that adds to “the security and happiness of every ...

From Press Room Raids to Indictments, Anything Goes When the Government Piles On

by John W. Whitehead August 23, 2023

“When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.”—Mike Thomas, sports editor What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of ...

Legalize Prostitution

by Walter Block August 7, 2023

If two unmarried consenting adults have sexual relations with each other, in all states but one (Mississippi) they violate no law. Such an act might be considered immoral by some, but that doesn’t mean that it should be a criminal offense. If the man pays the woman for sex with dinners, a movie, flowers, etc. again there is no crime ...

Macaulay and My 75-Cent Epiphanies, Part 1

by James Bovard August 1, 2023

Part 1 | Part 2 Fearing that my writing style was becoming anemic, I recently sought a literary booster shot from my bookshelves. Happily, a dozen volumes of Thomas Macaulay awaited me. Macaulay made history mesmerizing, and I have been captivated by his speed, grace, and wit for 40 years. Nobody would mistake my shelf of Macaulay books for leather-bound ...

Why Not Equalize Beauty, Talent, and Intelligence?

by Walter Block July 12, 2023

A basic premise of the “progressive” (actually, regressive) left is that the rich have too much money and the poor have too little. Therefore, they say, it is justified to take wealth away from the former and give it to the latter. The typical means leftists use to accomplish this is to adopt a steeply progressive tax ...

Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and College Admissions

by Laurence M. Vance July 10, 2023

Conservatives are cheering and progressives are crying about the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which was consolidated with Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina et al. The cases began in 2014 when Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) — a nonprofit ...

Everyone Should Have the Same Freedom to Contract — or Not

by George Leef July 1, 2023

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, that seems to turn on the meaning of the First Amendment. In my view, this is indeed an important case, but casting it as a free speech dispute is mistaken. The real issue is whether all Americans enjoy freedom of contract, or if, instead, some ...

The U.S. Government Is the Real Criminal

by John W. Whitehead June 22, 2023

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”—H.L. Mencken And so it continues. This entire fiasco—indicting Donald Trump for allegedly violating both the Espionage ...

Jeremy Bentham, Usury Laws, and the CFPB

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2023

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in a case that challenges the constitutionality of the funding of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), “a 21st century agency that implements and enforces Federal consumer financial law and ensures that markets for consumer financial products are fair, transparent, and competitive.” The agency was created by the Dodd-Frank ...