Freedom Daily Archive

Would You Abdicate If You Could Be the Dictator?

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2022

Leonard E. Read, the founding and long-serving first president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), once told a story about when he first met the famous Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. It was in 1940, shortly after Mises had arrived in the United States from war-torn Europe. Read had invited Mises to Los Angeles to deliver a talk ...

Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich, Part 2

by George Leef July 1, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich — How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden (University of Chicago Press, 2020). McCloskey and Carden also devote many chapters to refuting mistaken ideas about the reasons for the Great Enrichment. Many economists have explained it as a ...

The Stultification of American Conscience

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2022

One of the fascinating consequences of public (i.e., government) schooling is that it molds the minds of children in such a way that by the time they become adults, their minds inevitably mirror whatever narrative the authorities happen to be advancing at any particular time. In fact, the indoctrination is oftentimes so effective that most of them have no ...

Supreme Court Tortures the Constitution Again

by James Bovard June 1, 2022

The Supreme Court ruled in March that Americans have no right to learn the grisly details of CIA torture because the CIA has never formally confessed its crimes. The case symbolizes how the rule of law has become little more than legal mumbo-jumbo to shroud official crimes. And it is another grim reminder that Americans cannot rely on politically ...

Libertarian Lessons from the Super Bowl

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2022

Even most non-sports fans like me know that the Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL). It is one of the world’s most watched sporting events, and it has the most expensive commercials (lately $7 million for 30 seconds). Some people watch the game just to see the commercials and the halftime show. ...

The Centenary of Ludwig von Mises’s Critique of Socialism

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2022

At a banquet dinner held in New York City on March 7, 1956, honoring the famous Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, another equally renowned member of the Austrian school of economics, Friedrich A. Hayek, delivered a talk highlighting the important contributions of his long-time mentor and close friend, going back to when they first met in the Vienna of ...

Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich, Part 1

by George Leef June 1, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich — How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Throughout almost all of human history, people lived miserably — far worse than even Thomas Hobbes famously said. Improvements? There weren’t any. Happiness? That ...

Restore Our Republic

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2022

As predictable as thunder following lightning, former CIA director Robert Gates recently declared that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasing assertiveness demonstrate the need for the U.S. government to remain an ever-growing, more powerful national-security state. Gates’s declaration appeared in an op-ed in the March 3, 2022, issue of the Washington Post. He also pointed to Iran and ...

Federal Testing Debacle Multiplied COVID Carnage

by James Bovard May 1, 2022

On a bitter cold January afternoon, lines of people awaiting free COVID tests stretched around the block at a Rockville, Maryland, public library. Looking at the scene reminded me of seeing East Germans lined up in endless queues in the 1980s to receive their potato and sauerkraut rations. But few of the people docilely waiting in Rockville recognized that ...

Conservatism, Libertarianism, and John Stuart Mill

by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2022

Although most conservatives of today seem to have forgotten him, conservatives of yesteryear honored and revered Russell Kirk (1918–1994). After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State College (now University), Kirk earned his master’s degree at Duke University and then his doctor of letters from the University of St. Andrews. Kirk was a prolific writer who wrote not only ...

In the Beginning: The Mont Pelerin Society, 1947

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2022

Seventy-five years ago, there occurred an important event in the post–World War II revival of free-market liberal ideas. Over the first ten days of April 1947, 39 people from Europe and the United States met in a hotel in Switzerland at a mountain place known as Mont Pelerin. They came together to discuss the future of economic, social, and ...

Human Irrationality and Free Markets

by Antony Sammeroff May 1, 2022

If everyone was irrational all of the time, we would be in big trouble. You’d never know when someone was suddenly going to swerve off the road for no apparent reason and drive into a building, or start babbling to you in tongues over the phone when all you wanted to do was order a pizza. That being said, people ...