Freedom Daily Archive

The New Deal and Roosevelt’s Seizure of Gold: A Legacy of Theft and Inflation, Part 2

by William L. Anderson September 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 The monetary system of the United States at the time of the Depression could not sustain inflation very long because the country was on a gold standard. If people sensed that the government was printing too many paper dollars, by law they could redeem those dollars from the government’s store of gold. Moreover, ...

Monopolies versus the Free Market, Part 1

by Gregory Bresiger September 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 Market domination that has been achieved in the private sector through efficiency and consumer satisfaction is a phenomenon of a free-market economy. Even without any competition, such a business can never take customers for granted because of the possibility that new entrants will ...

The Eminent-Domain Origin of Shenandoah National Park

by Bart Frazier September 1, 2006

The establishment of Shenandoah National Park in 1926 is one of the greatest abuses of eminent domain in our country’s history. With the Commonwealth of Virginia condemning the entire area and removing more than 450 families, many by force, the park would eventually encompass 196,000 acres. After people were evicted, Virginia transferred the property to the federal government and ...

A Century of Interventionism and Regime Change

by Anthony Gregory September 1, 2006

Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer (New York: Times Books, 2006); 400 pages; $27.50. Since September 11, the U.S. government has overthrown the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. Most Americans appear to think of these actions as defensible in principle ...

The Federal War on Gold, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Given the rising price of gold and the fact that federal spending is totally out of control, the prospect of gold confiscation and criminalizing the private ownership of gold by federal authorities inevitably rears its ugly head. There are few things that federal big spenders hate more than gold. ...

Beware Income-Tax Casuistry, Part 1

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 For many opponents of the income tax the name Brushaber is magical. It comes from Frank R. Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., the 1916 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the 1913 income-tax law passed under the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That income-tax opponents would ...

Lies and Leviathan

by James Bovard August 1, 2006

Big government requires big lies and not just on wars but across the board. The more powerful government becomes, the more abuses it commits and the more lies it must tell. Interventions beget debacles that require cover-ups and denials. The more the government screws up, the more evidence the government is obliged to bury or deny. The government becomes ...

The New Deal and Roosevelt’s Seizure of Gold: A Legacy of Theft and Inflation, Part 1

by William L. Anderson August 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 In a recent discussion on the economy with a faculty colleague, I reminded her of some of the absurdities of New Deal economic policies (many of which have been laid out in previous issues of Freedom Daily and elsewhere). She reminded me that Franklin D. Roosevelt is a “hero” to her and ...

Economic Freedom and the Peasant Uprising of 1381

by Scott McPherson August 1, 2006

There’s no bread, let them eat cake There’s no end to what they’ll take Flaunt the fruits of noble birth Wash the salt into the earth. — “Bastille Day,” by Rush Beginning roughly from the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, feudalism took hold of England and replaced the Saxon institutions that had defined that land for six centuries. Under this ...

Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880)

by Wendy McElroy August 1, 2006

In 1853, Lucretia Mott described the Quaker women of the Massachusetts community into which she had been born. “Look at the heads of those women; they can mingle with men; they are not triflers; they have intelligent subjects of conversation.” Quakers believed that all people were equal before God and, so, every human being’s autonomy deserved equal respect. They ...

Piercing through Myths, Lies, and Stupidity

by George Leef August 1, 2006

Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel (Hyperion 2006); 304 pages; $24.95. John Stossel, anchor of the ABC News program 20/20, is a rarity among the ranks of American media personalities. He’s a skeptic when it comes to everything except freedom. He even calls himself a libertarian. Over the years, ...

Libertarianism Is the Key to Our Future

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2006

Why do I remain convinced that the American people will return to their libertarian heritage, especially given the continued trend toward socialism and interventionism in Washington, D.C.? There are three reasons: freedom, morality, and pragmatism. Freedom Almost everyone prizes the concept of freedom. Yet relatively few people in history have realized it. Throughout recorded history, most people have had to live ...