Freedom Daily Archive

Vietnam Redux: All Power to Lying Politicians

by James Bovard June 1, 2003

Americans are once again dying overseas because politicians have dragged the nation into an unnecessary war. Once the U.S. military invaded Iraq, Bushs approval ratings shot up through the roof. As American blood was flowing, most Americans approved of Bushs conduct. And yet it is precisely when a politicians approval is highest when his power is greatest that the greatest ...

Health-Care Socialism

by Scott McPherson June 1, 2003

Some ideas die hard. Among the most resilient is the Utopian belief that health care could be cheap, free, and available to all, if only we’d let the government take care of it. It was in the spirit of reviving this tragically unwise socialist idea that former president Bill Clinton and Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) addressed separate audiences last ...

Why Socialism Is the People’s Choice

by James Ostrowski June 1, 2003

Why is socialism more popular than capitalism? We have had 150 years to dissect socialism in theory. We have had 100 years to see socialism in action. Socialism, extensive government control over the economy, is a disaster in theory and a disaster in practice. The superiority of capitalism over socialism has been amply demonstrated by Ludwig von Mises, F.A. ...

Book Review: The Mind and the Market

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2003

The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought by Jerry Z. Muller (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); 487pages; $30. In the 1920s and 1930s, the well-known Italian classical-liberal historian Guglielmo Ferrero attempted to explain the reasons for the social disruptions and civil wars that European society had gone through from the time of the French Revolution in 1789. ...

Economic Liberty and the Constitution, Part 12

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2003

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 |  Table of Contents Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in ...

An American Empire! If You Want It instead of Freedom, Part 2

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2003

Part 1 | Part 2 Also making a case for an imperial role for the United States is Deepak Lal, professor of international development studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lal has long been a leading opponent of central planning and regulation in developing countries and a strong advocate of free markets and competition. On October 30, ...

Concentric Circles

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2003

Libertarians are always happy to get noticed in the mainstream media. It happens so seldom. But not all attention is good attention, even when it’s sympathetic. Susan Lee, of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, teaches this lesson in her article on the newspaper’s editorial page of February 12. Ominously titled “Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll,” Lee’s article pays ...

Bush at War

by James Bovard May 1, 2003

This article was posted March 5, 2003. Bob Woodward, the famed Watergate investigator and now a senior editor at the Washington Post, was granted unprecedented access to George W. Bush and to some of the top players in his administration in the wake of September 11. The result is a new book — ...

Free-Market Environmentalism

by Bart Frazier May 1, 2003

One of the most important lessons that economics teaches is that incentives matter. Economics is not a field that is normally associated with the environmental movement, but the recognition of the importance of incentives has led to a schism in the movement between those environmentalists who turn to the state to protect the environment and those who instead rely ...

Étienne de La Boétie, Part 2

by Wendy McElroy May 1, 2003

Part 1 | Part 2 The beginning of a tyrant’s rule was the most difficult period because those who had not consented to his rule would obey reluctantly, and brute force might be necessary. Brute force could put down dissent in the short term but it was never a good option. Violence bred martyrs, it increased popular resistance against ...

A Historian Looks at Tax Havens

by Charles Adams May 1, 2003

The recent attack on tax havens by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has depicted about 20–30 countries, called tax havens, as destructive of the high tax systems of the world, especially Europe. The OECD argues that its members should gang up on these nations and shut down their financial centers unless ...

Book Review: Bad Neighbor Policy

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2003

Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America by Ten Galen Carpenter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); 282 pages; $24.95. The U.S. government’s war on drugs has been going on since 1914, when new federal regulations were imposed making many narcotics illegal. Through most of the 19th century, opium and cocaine were obtainable legally from pharmacies with few ...