Freedom Daily Archive

Emergencies: The Breeding Ground of Tyranny

by William L. Anderson November 1, 2006

When the New York Times recently reported that the Bush administration was routinely tracking international and domestic financial transactions, the president said he was doing these things under emergency powers granted to him by Congress. While many commentators have openly questioned the legality of Bush’s actions, there are deeper questions to be asked than simply “Is this legal?” Indeed, as ...

U.S. Immigration Debate Is a Road Well Traveled

by Michael Powell November 1, 2006

They were portrayed as a disreputable lot, the immigrant hordes of this great city. The Germans refused for decades to give up their native tongue and raucous beer gardens. The Irish of Hell’s Kitchen brawled and clung to political sinecures. The Jews crowded into the Lower East Side, speaking Yiddish, fomenting socialism, and resisting forced assimilation. And by their sheer ...

The Federal Ripoff

by George Leef November 1, 2006

The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money by Timothy P. Carney (Wiley, 2006); 285 pages; $24.95. Frédéric Bastiat called it legal plunder — the process by which people and organizations use their political connections to obtain wealth that doesn’t belong to them. When a government ...

The Federal War on Gold, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 It is impossible to overstate the significance of the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s confiscation of gold and its nullification of gold clauses in contracts. It is one of the most sordid episodes in American history. To get an accurate sense of Roosevelt’s actions, it would not be inappropriate to compare what ...

Beware Income-Tax Casuistry, Part 3

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 In 1895, when the U.S. Supreme Court knocked out an income-tax law in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., the champions of income taxation in America suffered a big setback. To reiterate what I said in part two of this series, the Court, contrary to what many ...

A Legacy of Anti-Terrorist Failure in Lebanon

by James Bovard October 1, 2006

The Bush administration is fond of favoring tough measures against terrorists. With the Bush team cheer-leading all the way, Israel reinvaded Lebanon in July in response to Hezbollah’s seizure of two Israeli soldiers. Israel and Hezbollah had been exchanging bombs and missiles for months — actually, years — prior ...

Zoning’s Attack on Liberty and Property

by Bart Frazier October 1, 2006

One of the most coercive tools that public officials have at their disposal is zoning. City councils and county boards throughout the country use zoning regulations to dictate which uses are permitted and which are not on every parcel of land within their jurisdiction. While sometimes well-intentioned, zoning regulations nevertheless ...

Monopolies Versus the Free Market, Part 2

by Gregory Bresiger October 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 Why do some think that successful firms are inherently evil? Why do many antitrust regulators actually believe that any firms that report consistently high profits should be under review by government officials? One part of the regulatory argument is ...

Lies and Myths about Opiates

by Randal Cousins October 1, 2006

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy by Theodore Dalrymple (New York: Encounter Books, 2006); 146 pages; $21.95. This is a hugely important book. If it gets sufficient attention, it could be a major landmark in the ongoing campaign to introduce truth into the honesty-challenged issue of recreational drugs. Although written very much from a conservative point of ...

The Federal War on Gold, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized the monetary system of the United States and set the nation on the road of inflationary plunder that has characterized other nations in history. The actions of these two presidents also provide a textbook example for understanding the animosity and antipathy that ...

Beware Income-Tax Casuistry, Part 2

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The United States got its first income tax during the War Between the States, again demonstrating that war harms ordinary people in more ways than militarily. During any war government becomes an especially voracious consumer of the people’s resources and dissent is stifled or suppressed. So it is ...

The Perils of Emergency Power

by James Bovard September 1, 2006

The New York Times reported on June 23 that President Bush invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to justify warrantless searches of Americans and other peoples financial data. According to Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey, the U.S. government may have conducted hundreds of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans and others personal financial data. The Bush administration used broad ...