Free Society

The Student Debt Conundrum

by Laurence M. Vance March 18, 2019

Using data from the Federal Reserve, Student Loan Hero — an organization that provides “resources, tools and information” to help “student loan borrowers understand their student loans and make intelligent repayment decisions” — reports that Among the Class of 2018, 69% of college students took out student loans, and they graduated with an average debt of ...

Reparations Nonsense

by Christine Smith March 11, 2019

Once again we are hearing that reparations should be given to black Americans, this time as political campaign rhetoric from several Democratic presidential candidates. As this subject surfaces again, it’s interesting to observe how many people of differing political ideologies appear to be confused by it. But it’s really very simple: There is no legitimate property-rights claim to be ...

Blasphemy Laws and Other Victimless Crimes

by Laurence M. Vance March 1, 2019

Pakistan is a Muslim country with harsh blasphemy laws. In 1986, during the military rule of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, it became a capital offence for anyone to insult the prophet Mohammed. Government officials who opposed the nation’s blasphemy laws have been assassinated. Late last year, a Christian woman in Pakistan, Aasiya Noreen, who had been convicted of blasphemy by a ...

The Fallacy of a Government Shutdown, the Reality of Freedom Lost

by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 2019

Another partial federal government “shutdown” began on December 22, 2018. The impression from the media and other commentaries easily suggested that the political and economic sky was about to fall. Various government departments were closed and some government services were reduced. And the fear was fostered that soon masses of people would be dying in the streets or driven ...

The Age of Tyrannical Surveillance

by John W. Whitehead February 27, 2019

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever... because there’s no delete button.”—Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Uncle Sam wants you. Correction: Big Brother wants you. To be technically accurate, Big Brother—aided and abetted by his corporate partners in crime—wants ...

Rule by Fiat

by John W. Whitehead February 21, 2019

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”—Richard Nixon Who pays the price for the dissolution of the constitutional covenant that holds the government and its agents accountable to the will of the people? We all do. This ill-advised decision by President Trump to circumvent the Constitution’s system of checks and balances by declaring a national emergency in ...

I’m Not Breaking Up with America This Valentine’s Day, and Neither Should You

by John W. Whitehead February 15, 2019

“There’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number ...

How the Word Liberalism Came to Mean Its Opposite

by Richard M. Ebeling February 14, 2019

Over time, words sometimes change their meanings or connotations. Think of the words naughty and nice. Apparently, naughty originally meant to have or be nothing (naught or zero), but then it took on the extra sense of something being worth nothing, until finally a person who was considered worth nothing became a bad individual, or at least someone who ...

These Are Dangerous Times, and the Government Is To Blame

by John W. Whitehead February 7, 2019

“As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America These are dangerous times. Mind you, when I say that these are dangerous times, it is not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which ...

Beware the Emergency State

by John W. Whitehead January 11, 2019

“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. ... Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to ...

Break the Cycle

by John W. Whitehead January 8, 2019

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.” — Edmund Burke Folks, it’s time to break the cycle. Let’s make 2019 the year we say no to the laundry list of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government for way too long. Let’s make 2019 the year we stop living in ...

Freedom Frauds: Fantasy-Based Political Philosophy

by James Bovard January 3, 2019

Jim is puzzled. Is equality a basis for a free society? Some leading philosophers seem to think so, but Jim is not so sure.