Free Society

Preventing Liberty from Becoming a Coronavirus Fatality

by Ted Galen Carpenter March 30, 2020

Public attitudes about the coronavirus outbreak increasingly exhibit features of a collective panic. That development creates the danger that government measures designed to deal with a very real public health problem may lead to enormous collateral damage both to the economy and the freedoms that Americans take for granted. Governments at all levels have taken ever more extreme (even outrageous) ...

Leaving People Alone Is the Best Way to Beat the Coronavirus

by Richard M. Ebeling March 24, 2020

The world has rapidly moved into a seemingly aggressive paternalistic planning mode in the face of the Coronavirus crisis. Many voices are heard to say that personal and economic liberties must be restricted or even temporarily banned. At the same time, many of those same voices are saying that at a moment like this government spending, for all intents ...

How the Police State Will Deal with a Coronavirus Outbreak

by John W. Whitehead March 20, 2020

“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, ...

Tradition and Why the Russians are Who They Are

by Richard M. Ebeling March 13, 2020

It is often said to be misplaced and inappropriate to use stereotypes when talking about people or entire nations. To do so is unfair to the wide diversity that exists among the individual citizens of any country over time or during any particular period of time. And this is no doubt true, but, nonetheless, there are such things as ...

Coronavirus vs. the Mass Surveillance State: Which Poses the Greater Threat?

by John W. Whitehead March 10, 2020

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the ...

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 ...

The Great College-Hunger Hoax

by James Bovard March 1, 2020

“Nearly half our college students are going hungry,” presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proclaimed in late November. Sanders’s tweet went viral, spurring more than 20,000 re-tweets and “likes.” Starving college students are a new rallying cry for social-justice warriors, spurring demands for new federal handouts and maybe even a college student-meal program modeled after school lunches. Some colleges are hyping hungry students ...

Liberty versus Political Paternalism

by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 2020

In 1951, German free-market economist Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966), delivered a series of lectures in Cairo, Egypt, titled “The Problems of Economic Order.” Looking over the terrain of modern politics and policy thinking in the world at that time, he told his audience, If I were asked to say what appeared to me as one of the gravest features of our ...

Capitalism, Freedom, and Progress

by George Leef March 1, 2020

Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin Press, 2018); 496 pages. Almost everyone knows Alan Greenspan as the long-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve System. What far fewer know is that in his younger days, Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand and her anti-collectivist philosophy. ...

A Case for Not Giving Up on the American Dream

by John W. Whitehead February 14, 2020

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”—Benjamin Franklin Listen: we don’t have to agree about everything. We don’t even have to agree about most things. We don’t have to love each other. We don’t even have to like each other. And we certainly don’t need to think alike or dress alike or worship alike or vote ...

The New Totalitarians

by Richard M. Ebeling February 12, 2020

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The defeat of Nazism in Europe was seen as not only a victory over tyranny, terror, and mass murder, but a triumph for the preservation of many of the most cherished human freedoms, including freedom of speech and the press, and free association. Such freedoms ...

FDR and Stalin Planned the Future of the World

by Richard M. Ebeling January 28, 2020

Seventy-five years ago, during the week of February 4-11, 1945, the most important Allied conference during the Second World War was held at Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula in the Soviet Union, between U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister, Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin. Their decisions determined the fate of tens of millions of people ...