Freedom Daily Archive

9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 Prior to the 9/11 attacks, The Future of Freedom Foundation was publishing articles warning that the U.S. government’s deadly and destructive interventionism in the Middle East would likely end up producing a retaliatory terrorist attack on American soil. We weren’t the only ones. The noted analyst Chalmers Johnson’s excellent book Blowback: The Costs and ...

Liberals’ Love Affair with Leviathan

by James Bovard February 1, 2022

The election of Joe Biden as president magically transformed all federal agencies, ensuring that their iron fists no longer posed any peril to the American people. Or at least that seems to be what many Biden supporters, liberals, and Democrats now believe. I stumbled upon that new catechism on a cold morning last November. I ambled online after breakfast and ...

Time to Put Uncle Sam on a Diet

by Laurence M. Vance February 1, 2022

A report issued a decade ago by the National Cancer Institute on the status of the American diet found that “three out of four Americans don’t eat a single piece of fruit in a given day, and nearly nine out of ten don’t reach the minimum recommended daily intake of vegetables.” The report concluded that “nearly the entire U.S. ...

The Social Engineer as Ethical Authoritarian

by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 2022

Since the start of the coronavirus crisis, advocates of greater government planning and redistribution have used “following the science” as the rhetorical cover to rationalize the growth in political paternalism. Now, however, some of them are coming out of the closet and insisting that economists, for example, must explicitly adopt an authoritarian ethic that requires the end to any ...

How Government Meddling Ruined Higher Education, Part 1

by George Leef February 1, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 There is no need whatsoever for government to provide, subsidize, or control education. As with all other services, people can voluntarily offer to provide teaching or training, and those who are interested in such services can choose among the individuals and institutions offering them in the market. That is true for primary and secondary ...

9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 Declaring that “veteran suicide is one of the greatest crises of our time,” Boston’s NPR news station, WBUR, reported that “since Sept. 11, 2001, just over 30,000 veterans have died by suicide — four times more than the number of U.S. military personnel who died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The website military.com ...

Will Politicians Revive American Slavery?

by James Bovard January 1, 2022

In the wake of America’s disastrous Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment was enacted to prohibit involuntary servitude. Unfortunately, top newspapers, pundits, and think tanks are now campaigning to nullify that prohibition. Apparently, slavery was evil not because of the unjust subjugation but because plantation owners, not politicians, were the profiteers. Politicians have long been hustling to establish their prerogative to ...

Boosting American Standing on the World Stage

by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2022

What do a member of the left-leaning New York Times editorial board and a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have in common? Usually, not very much. But when it comes to how America can boost its standing on the world stage, they are in perfect agreement: The United States should give away more COVID-19 vaccines ...

Government Planning Brings neither Freedom, Prosperity, nor Equality

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2022

America is in the grip of a serious counterrevolution against the ideas and ideals upon which the country was founded. Whether it concerns fears about the physical environment or frustrations with the domestic economy or charges of society-wide “systemic racism,” the presumption is that the problem stems from people having too much freedom or the wrong types of freedom. The ...

The Fabric of Civilization

by Neera K. Badhwar January 1, 2022

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World  by Virginia Postrel, Basic Books, 2021, 320 pages. Virginia Postrel’s Fabric of Civilization is a fascinating, deeply researched tale of the development of fabric. Starting with fiber to make string, it takes us through the development of thread, to natural fabric, and finally to synthetics. It tells of ...

A Great Opportunity to Restore the Republic

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2021

With the debacle in Afghanistan, the American people have been presented with one of the greatest opportunities in our lifetime — an opportunity to dismantle the national-security establishment and restore our founding system of a limited-government republic. Opportunities like this do not often present themselves. Now is time to seize the day, before the national-security establishment is able to ...

My Two-Bit Political Awakening

by James Bovard December 1, 2021

Samuel Johnson may have been wrong when he declared, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” But for young kids, collecting coins is a less pernicious pastime than becoming a pyromaniac or Tik-Tok star. My own experience collecting, buying, and selling coins vaccinated me against trusting politicians long before ...