Free Society

TGIF: Crime and Punishment in a Free Society

by Sheldon Richman December 6, 2013

Would a free society be a crime-free society? We have good reason to anticipate it. Don’t accuse me of utopianism. I don’t foresee a future of new human beings who consistently respect the rights of others. Rather, I’m drawing attention to the distinction between crime and tort — between offenses against the state (or society) and offenses against individual persons ...

Roger Williams: The Separation of Conscience and State

by Wendy McElroy December 1, 2013

There was a whole country in America ... to be set on fire by the rapid motion of a windmill in the head of one particular man ... one Mr. Roger Williams. — Cotton Mather, New England Puritan minister Roger Williams (c. 1603–1683), founder of Rhode Island, was a key figure in forging the distinctive American character. The American was ...

FFF Webinar: The Phony Trade-Off between Freedom and Security

by Sheldon Richman November 14, 2013

FFF vice president and editor Sheldon Richman hosted a free, interactive online webinar entitled “The Phony Trade-off between Freedom and Security.” This was an interactive experience with Sheldon and and the participants.

AmeriCorps: Idealistic Triumph or Usual Buffoonery?

by James Bovard November 1, 2013

National service is the latest fashionable panacea for all that ails America. Time magazine ran a July cover story, “How Service Can Save Us,” on the potential benefits of pressing all young people into service. The article approvingly quoted a retired Air Force veteran: “There isn’t an 18-year-old boy who doesn’t need to get his butt kicked by someone ...

Whither Power?

by Kevin Carson November 1, 2013

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moisés Naím (Basic Books 2013), 320 pages. The topic of Moisés Naím’s book is the decay of power — the shift of power “from brawn to brains, from north to south and west to east, ...

TGIF: Treating People Like Garbage

by Sheldon Richman October 4, 2013

The government “closed” this week. The quotation marks are meant to indicate that the worst parts of the government remain open at some level. It would be preferable to keep the monuments and national parks, like the Grand Canyon, going while closing the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the NSA, ICE, FBI, ATF, and all related so-called national-security ...

Voting Rights as Bogus Panaceas

by James Bovard October 1, 2013

The Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last June. “Liberals” were horrified and reacted as if the Civil War had been fought in vain. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg denounced the decision for its “hubris,” Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) condemned it as a “dagger” stab at civil rights, and Attorney General Eric Holder ...

America’s Surveillance State

by Wendy McElroy September 1, 2013

J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-Interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939-1945, by Douglas M. Charles (Ohio State University Press, 2007), 197 pages. The domestic surveillance state is sometimes called the electronic police state. Those in political power use law enforcement to closely monitor the opinions and peaceful behavior of citizens in order ...

Gun Control and Drug Control

by Laurence M. Vance August 7, 2013

The Democratic attempt to enact additional or more draconian gun-control legislation is dead. Liberals in and out of Congress — many of whom would prefer that only members of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the police be armed — have lost the momentum they thought they had after the Sandy Hook school shooting last year in ...

Government Is the Problem

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2013

Last spring Barack Obama told the graduating class of Ohio State University, Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems.… They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is ...

TGIF: What an Honest Conversation about Race Would Look Like

by Sheldon Richman July 19, 2013

Ever since George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin hit the national headlines last year, calls for an “honest conversation about race” have been heard throughout America. (Up until then, apparently, we’ve had only conversations about having a conversation about race.) However, one need not believe that the Zimmerman shooting and verdict were about race — I watched the ...

Creating a Culture of Denunciation

by Wendy McElroy July 2, 2013

On June 10, the Guardian featured an article entitled “Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America” by Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame. He stated, The NSA, FBI, and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi — the secret police in the former “democratic republic” of ...