Freedom Daily Archive

Jane Jacobs: The Spontaneity of Cities

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 2006

Lovers of freedom, cities, and spontaneous social processes lost a great champion April 25 when Jane Jacobs died at age 89. She was truly a remarkable woman. With no more than a high-school diploma, but also a keen eye for what other people miss and the ability to turn a phrase, ...

Operation Founding Fathers

by James Bovard July 1, 2006

Few subjects generate more official lies than the U.S. government’s devotion to spreading democracy abroad. Iraq has been the largest most recent geyser of such deceits. In order to understand future U.S. government messianic democracy efforts, it is worthwhile to review the opportunism with respect to representative government in Iraq. In a late February 2003 Washington speech, George W. Bush ...

Housing Socialism, Part 2

by Gregory Bresiger July 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 The desire for self-improvement is not the mentality behind price-control laws and rent-control laws. Behind them is the mentality of social engineering. It is a mentality subscribed to by those who want the government to micro-manage prices, wages, and even the level of ...

The Drug War’s Immorality and Abject Failure

by Anthony Gregory July 1, 2006

If the idea is to create a drug-free America, then we can safely say that after hundreds of billions of dollars spent, millions of arrests, and decades of escalating police and military efforts, the war on drugs is a complete failure. The reason is clear if you think about it. The ...

Better Surfing Comes with Property Rights

by Bart Frazier July 1, 2006

Property rights have long been recognized as a cornerstone of individual liberty and economic prosperity. As long as people are secure in their right to use, alter, and trade their belongings as they see fit, freedom and an ever-increasing standard of living are the result. However, not all rights to property are clearly defined. When property rights are unclear ...

A Man’s Home Is His Castle

by Wendy McElroy July 1, 2006

The Castle is a tacky tract house in Melbourne, Australia, where the quirky Kerrigans live in the firm belief that they are the luckiest family in the world. Their house is so close to the airport that planes almost scrape their roof. But instead of complaining, patriarch Darryl feels lucky to have such an up-close view of man’s conquest ...

Liberty, Power, and the Constitution

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2006

A few years ago, I was delivering a lecture on the Constitution to an assembly consisting of a couple hundred high-school students. I made the following observation, which threw the students into an uproar: “The First Amendment to the Constitution does not give people the right to free speech.” Immediately, I was pummeled by criticisms from all across the ...

Libertarian Class Analysis

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 2006

Say the words “class analysis” or “class conflict” and most people will think of Karl Marx. The idea that there are irreconcilable classes, their conflict inherent in the nature of things, is one of the signatures of Marxism. That being the case, people who want nothing to do with Marxism quite naturally want nothing to do with class analysis. So ...

Killing in the Name of Democracy

by James Bovard June 1, 2006

President George W. Bush perpetually invokes the goal of spreading democracy to sanctify his foreign policy. Unfortunately, he is only the latest in a string of presidents who cloaked aggression in idealistic rhetoric. Killing in the name of democracy has a long and sordid history. The U.S. government’s first experience with forcibly spreading democracy came in the wake of the ...

Housing Socialism, Part 1

by Gregory Bresiger June 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 In every country examined, the introduction and continuance of rent control/restriction has done much more harm than good in rental housing markets — let alone the economy at large — by perpetuating shortages, encouraging immobility, swamping consumer preferences, fostering dilapidation of housing ...

Public Schools Have Flunked Out

by James Ervin Norwood June 1, 2006

Public schools are brain dead and on life support; so let’s pull the plug on them, give them a decent funeral, and let better alternatives take root and flourish. Education is what we must save and regenerate, not an obsolete proven flop that has been in a persistent counterproductive condition for decades. The time has come to slaughter a sacred ...

Monsters, Inc.

by Samuel Bostaph June 1, 2006

In 2001, an animated film from Pixar Animation Studios was released and became extremely popular with both adults and children. Monsters, Inc. is set in the city of Monstropolis, where all monsters live. A corporation that gives the title to the movie employs scarers, monsters who venture out of the city every night to enter the human world through ...