Freedom Daily Archive

Your Tax Dollars Bankroll Afghan Child-Molesters

by James Bovard May 1, 2018

Donald Trump was hailed by the media last August when he announced he was sending more U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan. A Washington Post editorial praised his “principled realism” and saluted “a rare but welcome story of self-correction” (since Trump had portrayed Afghanistan as a lost cause when he was a presidential candidate). A New York Daily News ...

Mencken’s Plan, Read’s Rule

by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2018

H.L. Mencken and Leonard Read couldn’t have been more different, but each of them said some important things about life in a free society. Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was born in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, lived nearly all of his life in the house he grew up in, and died in his bed. He was a third-generation Baltimorean. Although ...

Ralph Raico: Master Historian

by Joseph R. Stromberg May 1, 2018

The death of historian Ralph Raico on December 13, 2016, robbed us of an erudite and insightful scholar whose long life made him witness to (and analyst of) massive changes in American society involving state building, imperialist wars, and loss of effective freedom. Born in 1936, Raico attended Ludwig von Mises’s famous New York seminar and translated Mises’s Liberalism ...

The Case against Schooling

by George Leef May 1, 2018

The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan (Princeton University Press, 2018, 395 pages). Almost every book on education policy (and I have read a great many of them) springs from the set of assumptions that education “experts” embrace: that schooling builds our stock of knowledge and ...

The Tyranny of Immigration Controls

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2018

Imagine the following conversation: John: Oh, my head hurts so bad. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Jack: If you stopped beating your head against that wall, your headache would go away. John: You libertarians are always so impractical and extreme. My headache has nothing to do with the fact that I am beating my head against this wall. I ...

The Bundy Ranch Case Explains Westerners’ Distrust of Washington

by James Bovard April 1, 2018

The Justice Department was caught in January in another high-profile travesty of due process. On December 20, federal judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial in the case against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and others after prosecutors were caught withholding massive amounts of evidence undermining federal charges. Two weeks later, she dismissed all charges against Bundy and his sons. Navarro ...

Dress Codes, Discrimination, and a Free Society

by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2018

A restaurant and nightclub in Washington, D.C. changed its dress code earlier this year after a complaint that it engaged in discrimination against non-whites. The incident serves as a valuable example of the place of dress codes and the practice of discrimination in a free society. Sneakers It was not the night before Christmas, but it was the Saturday night before. ...

Open Borders: Trade, Migration, Entrepreneurship, and Property

by Ken Schoolland April 1, 2018

For good reason people ask how nations can become more prosperous. Usually the start is “Why is there poverty?” But the real question should be “Why is there wealth?” Poverty is the natural condition of all peoples of the world throughout history. Only in the past couple hundred years have we seen an astounding rise in the amount of ...

Nightfall on the American Empire

by Matthew Harwood April 1, 2018

In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power by Alfred W. McCoy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). In August of 2007, David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States and director of the Government Accountability Office, delivered a speech remarkable for its plainspoken nature to the Federal Midwest Human Resources ...

Dismantling Roosevelt’s New Deal

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2018

In the midst of the congressional debate over Donald Trump’s tax bill, leftists accused Republicans of planning to dismantle Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. While the fear-mongering was baseless, given that Republicans favor the New Deal programs and philosophy as much as liberals do, the question naturally arises: Why shouldn’t Americans dismantle this almost- century-old socialist and interventionist experiment?   It is ...

Trump and the Right to #Resist

by James Bovard March 1, 2018

Since Donald Trump’s election, it has become fashionable for his opponents to use a #Resist hashtag on their social media postings. Public demonstrations have become more fashionable than at any time since the Vietnam War. Federal agencies are actively working to thwart the Trump administration; the Obama holdover chief of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau even refused to vacate ...

What Ken Burns Left Out of the Vietnam Story

by Gareth Porter March 1, 2018

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, 2017; 640 pages) The companion coffee-table book to the 10-part PBS series by Ken Burns, The Vietnam War, is so closely tied to the series that it’s left ambiguous whether Ken Burns himself is the co-author or not. Burns is shown as the ...