Freedom Daily Archive

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 5

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Libertarians, unlike conservatives and leftists, believe that people should be free to live their lives any way they wish, as long as their conduct remains peaceful. That is, as long as people do not murder, rape, steal, loot, plunder, defraud, and so ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 6: Ludwig von Mises and the Non-Neutrality of Money

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | ...

Four Cheers for Capitalism

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 1997

Is capitalism morally wanting? A lot of people think so and not just the Clintons and left-wingers. Conservatives, of both the neo and paleo variety have never been comfortable with what they call "unbridled" capitalism. Just recently William Bennett, the former drug czar and education czar and now neoconservatism's vicar of virtue, launched an attack on capitalism in announcing ...

The Drug War vs. Public Health and Safety

by James Bovard June 1, 1997

Many Americans recognize that the drug war has jailed hundreds of thousands of people whose sole crime was to possess substances that politicians did not approve of. However, this is only the start of the casualty list of the drug war. Many other Americans have suffered who themselves had little or nothing to do with narcotics. Foolish drug regulations are ...

Repealing, Not Reforming, Social Security, Part 1

by Doug Bandow June 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 Social Security may be the most important domestic issue in Washington today. Everyone in the nation's capital is for a balanced budget, or so it seems. Even if these most election-minded of politicos were serious, however, there would remain a rather serious fly in the ointment. Politicians preaching a balanced budget want us to believe ...

Book Review: Hungry Ghosts

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 1997

Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine by Jasper Becker (New York: Free Press, 1996); 352 pages; $25. In 1994, Mao Zedong's personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, published The Private Life of Chairman Mao. Leading experts on Chinese communist history say that the book is authentic and accurate. He served Mao from 1955 until ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 In a primitive, economically poor society, a person has to do a lot of basic jobs just to survive. He has to be a master of many trades. But as a society becomes wealthier and more complex, people begin to specialize at ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 5: The Austrian Economists on the Origin and Purchasing Power of Money

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | ...

The Campaign Finance Red Herring [long]

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 1997

Campaign-finance reform is again on the public agenda. The scandals involving the Democratic National Committee and the taint surrounding House Speaker Newt Gingrich have renewed for the umpteenth time the calls for a drastic overhaul of how politics is funded in America. The DNC unilaterally announced it would no longer take money from noncitizens or foreign corporations. It also ...

The Latest Gun Control Fiasco

by James Bovard May 1, 1997

The nation's police forces are up in arms over a new federal gun control law that could strip thousands of them of their guns and jobs. Most police organizations have enthusiastically supported every gun control scheme President Clinton has put forward. Few Americans realized that such legislation almost always contained an exemption for the policemen themselves regarding their official ...

The Penalty of Surrender: Part II

by Leonard Read May 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 To me, "Thou shalt not steal" is a principle not because some sage of antiquity said so but because, in my own experience, it has been revealed as a principle which must be adhered to if we are not to perish from the face of the earth. To the ones who have not been graced ...

Book Review: The End of Welfare

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 1997

The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society by Michael Tanner (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996); 226 pages; $10.95. Thirty years ago, when the welfare-state programs of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty were first being implemented, the general consensus among the political elite and the intellectual community was that wise government, with sufficient funding, could lift the poor ...