Freedom Daily Archive

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 3

by Danny Sjursen June 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory, and shed American blood upon American soil. War exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself. — ...

Socialism, American Style, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5  | Part 6 In September 1990, the first year of The Future of Freedom Foundation’s existence, FFF published an article I wrote entitled “Letting Go of Socialism.” The article’s opening paragraph stated, Socialism has held the world in its grip since the ...

The REAL ID Act Ravages Our Liberty

by James Bovard May 1, 2020

National ID cards have been atop the command-and-control political wish list for decades. In the 1990s, Republican Congresses shot down efforts to move toward national identification cards. However, after 9/11, “everything changed” and politicians seized the chance to unleash far more snooping and create potentially hundreds of millions of dossiers on American citizens. Congress passed the REAL ID Act in ...

Liberal Democracy versus Democratic Socialism versus Social Democracy

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2020

The presidential primary campaign of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination and the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress from New York have once again raised the issue of the desirability for and the possibility of a system of “democratic socialism.” For many of their critics and opponents the operative word is “socialism” in their vision of a new ...

Democrats, Republicans, and the Constitution

by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2020

In July 2017, after President Donald Trump had been in office for less than six months, Congressmen Al Green (D-Calif.) and Brad Sherman (D-Tex.) introduced in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives an article of impeachment (H. Res. 438) against the president for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Said Green, “I am introducing Articles of Impeachment to begin a long ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 2

by Danny Sjursen May 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 The Constitution was, and is, emphatic on one matter, at least: only Congress possesses the power to declare war. In the 1840s, an era of legislative preeminence, even the high-risk Tyler blanched, aware that the agreement exceeded his authority. ...

Reform versus Liberty

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2020

Americans alive today have grown up in what libertarians term a welfare-warfare state. It is a system in which the primary purpose of the federal government is to take care of people and keep them safe and secure. This type of governmental system is also sometimes referred to as a paternalistic state, given that the federal government essentially plays ...

Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid

by James Bovard April 1, 2020

Foreign aid to Ukraine helped spur the Democrats’ effort to impeach and remove President Trump earlier this year. Ukraine was supposed to be on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by U.S. government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid ...

Religion and Education in a Free Society

by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2020

Montgomery County, Maryland, which lies just outside of Washington, D.C., is one of America’s richest and most populous counties. It is also home to the largest school system in Maryland and fourteenth-largest in the United States. For the current school year (2019-2020), the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system has 208 schools, more than 165,000 students, more than 24,000 ...

Fifty Years of Statist Policies and Economic Fallacies

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 2020

It is about fifty years since, as an undergraduate, I took my first economics classes in college. Virtually all my professors were adamant that unrestrained market capitalism was unworkable, and on the way out. Planning, many of them said, was the future for complex societies and economic development. Like “deva vu, all over again,” the same claims are being ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 1

by Danny Sjursen April 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 I had a horror of the Mexican War ... only I had not the moral courage enough to resign. — Ulysses S. Grant (1879) The phrase “regime change wars” has, of late, taken on profound meaning and stoked massive controversy. ...

Achieving Freedom

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2020

Achieving freedom necessarily depends on removing infringements on freedom. If all that we libertarians succeed in doing is modifying, reforming, or improving infringements on freedom, the most we will have achieved is an improvement in our condition as serfs living under America’s welfare-warfare-state way. That would be good. But it would not be freedom. Consider life in 1850 Alabama. Imagine ...