Freedom Daily Archive

Let’s Retire the Drug War

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2001

Retired army general Barry McAfree has announced that he is now retiring from his position as America’s drug czar. If only he would take the war on drugs with him. Of all the domestic wars that the U.S. government has waged in the last several decades, the war on drugs has got to be the most immoral and destructive of ...

Food, Education, and Health Care

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2001

HAVE YOU EVER stayed up late at night worrying about whether there would be sufficient food in your community’s grocery stores the next day? Paced the floor over whether there would be the correct quantities of food for everyone? Fretted over whether rich people would buy up everything and leave ...

The Fundamental Rights of the European Union: Individual Rights or Welfare-State Privileges? Part 1

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2001

Thirty years ago, British economist William R. Lewis wrote a monograph for the Institute of Economic Affairs in London entitled Rome or Brussels...? His theme was the contrast between the original motives and purposes behind the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 through the Treaty of Rome and what the EEC had become by the early ...

Young People Aren’t Skeptical Enough!

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2001

Nearly everyone seems to agree on one thing: young people are tragically skeptical about politics. The subject came up in the third debate between Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush, both of whom bemoaned the political disillusionment of the young. Minnesota’s governor, Jesse Ventura, constantly ...

Clinton’s Kosovo Frauds

by James Bovard January 1, 2001

AS AMERICANS DEBATE what President Clinton’s legacy should be, too little attention is given to his remarks on Kosovo. The United States launched a war against a European nation largely at Clinton’s behest. Clinton’s war against Serbia epitomized his moralism, his arrogance, his refusal to respect law, and his fixation on proving his virtue ...

The Second Amendment Protects an Individual Right

by Benedict D. LaRosa January 1, 2001

THERE IS A popular misconception that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution refers to a collective right rather than an individual right. Both history and reason argue against this misinterpretation. The right to self- (and collective) defense does not originate with, nor is it dependent upon, the Second Amendment. Man has ...

Morals and the Welfare State, Part 4

by F.A. Harper January 1, 2001

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ISN’T IT a strange thing that if you select any three fundamentally moral persons and combine them into a collective for the doing of good, they are liable at once to become three immoral persons in their collective ...

Book Review: Feeling Your Pain

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2001

Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years by James Bovard (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); 426 pages; $26.95. WHEN THE HISTORY of the last decade of the 20th century is written sometime in the future, chroniclers of the 1990s will probably, at first, be tempted to emphasize the apparent triumphs of freedom around ...

Reflections on Liberty at Christmastime

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2000

ONE OF THE biggest differences between Christian statists and Christian libertarians concerns the role of the state in matters pertaining to morality. Christian statists believe that the state should be God’s partner who ensures, through fines and imprisonment, that people follow the correct moral path. Christian libertarians, on ...

Market Liberalism, International Order, and World Peace, Part 2

by Richard M. Ebeling December 1, 2000

Part 1 | Part 2 In 1952 ,free-market economist Michael A. Heilperin delivered a lecture entitled “An Economist’s Views on International Organization.” He told his audience, It is an elementary, but often forgotten, knowledge that policies of national governments have always been the principle obstacle to economic relations between people living in various countries, and that whenever these relations ...

No One Is Qualified

by Sheldon Richman December 1, 2000

WHEN YOU CLEAR away all of the obfuscation from presidential campaigns, the entire process comes down to each candidates accusing the others of not being qualified for the office. This was certainly true in the 2000 presidential campaign. And every candidate who said or implied that about his opponents was absolutely right. No one is qualified to be president. No ...

Laptops to the Rescue

by James Bovard December 1, 2000

ONE OF of President Clintons favorite boasts is that he put 100,000 new cops on the streets. He claimed in 1994 that putting the new cops on the street would make Americans freer from fear and that there is simply no better crime-fighting tool to be found than multiplying the number of government employees packing heat. Vice President Al ...