Freedom Daily Archive

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Karl Marx wrote that the value of an item is determined by how much labor goes into producing it. A diamond is valuable because of all the work that goes into mining it. Therefore, Marx argued, since value is created by the ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 4: Benjamin Anderson and the False Goal of Price-Level Stabilization

by Richard M. Ebeling April 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 Nature of the Welfare State

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1997

Welfare-state programs have three central characteristics: plunder, deception, and obfuscation. Because those programs always effect a forcible transfer of wealth from one group of individuals to another, they involve what the great 19th-century economist Frederic Bastiat called "legalized plunder." The law sanctions stealing in these cases and is thereby changed from its original purpose, which was to protect people's ...

Police Brutality: A License to Maul

by James Bovard April 1, 1997

The Founding Fathers sought to create a "government of laws, not of men." A key principle of this doctrine is that no person is above the law — that every government employee must obey the same laws that government imposes on private citizens. Unfortunately, when it comes to police brutality, ...

The Penalty of Surrender, Part 1

by Leonard Read April 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 These remarks, hardly more than a personal confession of faith, have their origin in an attitude or behavior commonly referred to as "compromising." The compromising attitude is exalted by many and deplored by only a few. As an example of the way this attitude is exalted, a certain business leader, perhaps the most publicized one in ...

Book Review: Critique of Interventionism

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1997

Critique of Interventionism by Ludwig von Mises, revised edition (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) 122 pages; $12.95. In the first decade of the 1800s, the French classical-liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say summarized in his book Treatise on Political Economy what became the general view of the majority of political economists throughout the early and middle decades of the ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 What would a free society look like? That is, what if everyone were free to live his life the way he wanted, so long as his conduct was peaceful, and free to enter into any mutually beneficial exchanges with anyone in the ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 3: The Federal Reserve and Price Level Stabilization in the 1920s

by Richard M. Ebeling March 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 | ...

Order without Design

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1997

Perhaps the toughest thing that libertarians have to persuade nonlibertarians of is the existence of order that is undesigned. It is certainly a counterintuitive idea. So much of our everyday experience seems to teach us that where there is order, there is a designer working from a plan. That fact ...

Destroying Families for the Glory of the Drug War, Part 2

by James Bovard March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 In Clyo, Georgia, 11-year-old Tony Johnson met police Sergeant Sam O'Dwyer during Tony's DARE training. After completing his training, Tony met with O'Dwyer three times and eventually informed the cop of a few marijuana plants on a corner of his parents' land near their trailer home. O'Dwyer busted Tony's mother on April 9, 1992. ...

The Individual in Society, Part 2

by Ludwig von Mises March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 Liberty and freedom are terms employed for the description of the social conditions of the individual members of a market society in which the power of the indispensable hegemonic bond, the state, is curbed lest the operation of the market be endangered. In a totalitarian system there is nothing to which the attribute "free" ...

Book Review: Libertarianism

by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 1997

Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz (New York: The Free Press 1997); 312 pages; $23.00. The greatest triumph of socialism during the last one hundred years has been the extent to which collectivist ideas dominate the vocabulary and the concepts of public policy. Socialism, ...