Free Society

Sunday Shopping

by Laurence M. Vance January 22, 2015

Just before Christmas, the country of Hungary joined other European countries such as Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in banning Sunday shopping. Although the Hungarian Parliament passed the bill on December 16, it isn’t scheduled to take effect until March 15 of this year. The legislation, which was supported by the prime minister but opposed by the economy minister, ...

TGIF: The Open Society and Its Worst Enemies

by Sheldon Richman January 16, 2015

Last week’s bloody events in Paris demonstrate yet again that a noninterventionist foreign policy, far from being a luxury, is an urgent necessity -- literally a matter of life and death. A government that repeatedly wages wars of aggression — the most extreme form of extremism — endangers the society it ostensibly protects by gratuitously making enemies, some of whom will seek revenge against ...

Lessons for Winning Liberty in a World of Statism

by Richard M. Ebeling January 13, 2015

Friends of freedom often become despondent when it seems that every day brings another growth and intrusion of government over people’s lives. But there is no reason to be disheartened, because there are lessons for winning liberty – from the opponents of freedom. Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, through most of the twentieth century and into ...

A New Year’s Resolution: Becoming a Light of Liberty

by Richard M. Ebeling January 8, 2015

With the beginning of 2015, what might be a “New Year’s resolution” for a friend of freedom? I would suggest that one answer is for each of us to do our best to become “lights of liberty” that will attract others to the cause of freedom and the free society. For five years, from 2003 to 2008, I had the ...

The Unpredictable Future and Winning Liberty

by Richard M. Ebeling December 31, 2014

As a new year begins, it is easy to consider that the prospects for freedom in America and in many other parts of the world to seem dim. After all, government continues to grow bigger and more intrusive, along with tax burdens that siphon off vast amounts of private wealth. Extrapolating these trends out for the foreseeable future, it would ...

State Heretics and State Infidels

by Wendy McElroy December 22, 2014

The term statolatry refers to worshiping the state as the source of goodness to which all else should be subordinated. In statolatry, instead of having a separation of church and state, the state replaces the church and becomes its own religion. In his book Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, Ludwig von Mises ...

The Origins and Intentions of Copyright

by Joseph S. Diedrich December 1, 2014

In a victory for media Goliaths, the Supreme Court recently ruled that TV-streaming service Aereo “perform ... copyrighted works publicly” and therefore violated copyright law. The ghost of Grokster haunts us. Napster rolls in its grave. Copyright’s muscular hands have once again strangled innovation. What is the purpose of copyright law? Conventional wisdom asserts that it protects the rights of ...

“Both Together, They Made a Very Good Book”

by Joseph R. Stromberg December 1, 2014

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right by Yuval Levin (Basic Books 2014), 235 pages. Yuval Levin’s well-written Great Debate is full of useful material, understandable explanation, and interesting reflections. It flows along smoothly and even entertainingly, unless that is a cuss word in serious circles. Levin goes through the Burke-Paine controversy ...

The Berlin Wall and the Spirit of Freedom

by Richard M. Ebeling November 18, 2014

This November marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On November 9, 1989, as the shaky East German communist government resigned, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Large crowds formed on both sides of the Wall. East and West Berliners climbed on top, and then people began using sledgehammers and ...

Jane Cobden: Carrying On Her Father’s Good Work

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2014

Among libertarians and classical liberals, the name Richard Cobden (1804–1865) evokes admiration and applause. His activities — and successes — on behalf of freedom, free markets, and government retrenchment are legendary. Most famously, he co-founded — with John Bright — the Anti–Corn Law League, which successfully campaigned for repeal of the import tariffs on grain. Those trade restrictions had ...

Reining In Out-of-Control Government

by David S. D'Amato November 1, 2014

The Classical Liberal Constitution by Richard A. Epstein (Harvard University Press 2014), 701 pages. In Book II of his Two Treatises of Government, John Locke says “that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” A towering figure in the Enlightenment, Locke is often called the father of classical ...

Winning Freedom Requires Radical Solutions

by Richard M. Ebeling October 14, 2014

Suppose that there was a button in front of you that if you pushed it would, in one instant, abolish all the governmental controls and regulations on the U.S. economy. Would you push that button, and transform America into a society of free men associating with each other on the basis of voluntary exchange, with government limited to protection ...