Free Society

Free Market Liberalism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

by Richard M. Ebeling June 9, 2021

The recent 11 days of warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has once more raised the issue of one-state or two-state “solutions” to the over seven decade Israel-Palestinian conflict. In the long run, neither is a viable option outside of a politics of individual liberty and an economics of free markets. There was a two-state solution laid out in ...

Make Way for the Snitch State

by John W. Whitehead June 3, 2021

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we ...

Biden’s Rescue Act Targets Americans’ Freedoms

by James Bovard June 1, 2021

Since the 1800s, surly Americans have derided politicians for spending tax dollars “like drunken sailors.” Until recently, that was considered a grave character fault. But Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act shows that inebriated spending is now the path to national salvation. It was a common saying in America in the 1930s that “we cannot squander our way to prosperity.” ...

The Seven Deadly Sins of Government

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2021

What do King Solomon, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great), Dante Alighieri, and Mohandas Gandhi have to do with modern governments? Nothing, really, except that their emphasis on seven deadly evils provides us with the perfect pattern to categorize the deadly sins of government. “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him,” said King ...

Total Tyranny

by John W. Whitehead May 21, 2021

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford It never fails. Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again. In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that ...

Victimhood Professionals Exploit Victims: Look at VAWA

by Wendy McElroy May 10, 2021

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is currently in the Senate awaiting debate and reauthorization. VAWA is the federal touchstone for how sexual abuse, especially domestic violence (DV), is addressed and funded nationwide. It has vastly expanded from its 1994 roots and epitomizes not only the inevitable drift of government toward greater power but also the dynamics ...

Building Up the State Means Pulling People Down

by Richard M. Ebeling May 7, 2021

I still vividly recall sitting with a high school friend on the evening of July 20, 1969 and watching on television as astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of the moon, a few minutes before 8 p.m., west coast Pacific time, and saying his famous words, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” ...

An Old Geezer on Learning about Liberty and Its Loss

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2021

I am now in my 70s. No longer a spring chicken but not a dead duck yet either, with, I hope, a few good years left. When I was in my mid 20s, I had the opportunity and good fortune to meet and interact for most of two summers with the noted Austrian economist and Nobel Prize winner Friedrich ...

Rule by Fiat: When the Government Does Whatever It Wants

by John W. Whitehead April 19, 2021

“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” — Ayn Rand Rule by brute force. That’s about as good a description ...

Will Treason Mania Destroy America?

by James Bovard April 1, 2021

At the start of the Biden era, America is being torn apart by more allegations of treason than at any time since the Civil War. Historian Henry Adams observed a century ago that politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” And few things spur hatred more effectively than tarring all political opponents as traitors. The Founding Fathers carved ...

Wars and “Following the Science” are Sure Paths to Tyranny

by Richard M. Ebeling March 31, 2021

In the first press conference of his presidency on March 25, 2021, Joe Biden announced that he had set a target of administering 200 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine before the end of his first 100 days in office. In an earlier statement before the press, Biden said that it might be safe enough for the government to ...

Welcome to Word Tyranny and Cultural Balkanization

by Richard M. Ebeling March 16, 2021

America has entered into a new era of thought control. Back in the 1960s, there was a determined campaign by many conservatives to resist the free speech movement symbolically headquartered on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Then, the idea was to respect people’s right to say what was on their minds, even when it was considered ...