Freedom Daily Archive

The Other Terrorism Problem

by James Bovard June 1, 2002

A JUSTICE DEPARTMENT report observed, “The feature distinguishing police from all other groups in society is their authority to apply coercive force.” Americans are taught to view police as trustworthy symbols of authority. Programs such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) put “Officer Friendly” in classrooms in order to endear law enforcement to children at an early age. The ...

Bill O’Reilly and the Conservative War on Drugs

by Thomas L. Johnson June 1, 2002

BILL O’REILLY IS HOT. He is a broadcast journalist who has a very popular cable-news program on the Fox News Channel called The O’Reilly Factor, and a widely read book of the same title. His latest book, The No Spin Zone, has been number one on the nonfiction bestseller list for many weeks. O’Reilly is intelligent and loquacious and a ...

Going Postal: A Libertarian Tradition

by Wendy McElroy June 1, 2002

BENJAMIN TUCKER, editor of Liberty (1881–1908) and the prototypical 19th-century radical libertarian, constantly experimented with strategies to educate people away from government. He particularly delighted in anti-government stickers, which he declared to be “highly useful” because of their cheapness and versatility. The stickers were “invented” by Steven T. Byington, who also translated Max Stirner’s Ego and His Own, and ...

Book Review: Communism

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2002

Communism: A History by Richard Pipes (New York: The Modern Library, 2001); 175 pages; $19.95. IT SEEMS HARD TO BELIEVE that it is already more than 10 years since the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was only about 10 years earlier, in 1981, that the conservative French social critic Jean-François Revel first published his book ...

Black Hawk Down and American GIs

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2002

The recently released movie Black Hawk Down raises interesting challenges to those who think theyre supporting American GIs when they support U.S. government decisions to send them into battle. In 1993, the Clinton administration sent U.S. soldiers into the capital city of Mogadishu, which was in the midst of a civil war, to capture a Somali warlord named Mohammad Farrah ...

Freedom, the Income Tax, and the Welfare State

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2002

Americans have come to believe that the IRS and the income tax are inevitable parts of our lives. After all, most everyone alive today has lived his entire life under federal income taxation. It wasn’t always that way. For some 125 years, the American people lived without having any tax imposed upon their income. The obvious question that arises is: Why ...

Classical Liberalism in the 21st Century: Freedom of Trade, Part 2

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2002

Part 1 | Part 2 A FUNDAMENTAL REVOLUTION IN IDEAS began to emerge in the 18th century against the premises and policies of mercantilism. These ideas undermined the rationales for government regulation and control of the economic affairs of the people of European society. In its place there arose a conception and vision of a free society based on ...

Do Americans Really Want Freedom?

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2002

Aye, free. Free as a tethered ass! W.S. Gilbert, Princess Ida AMERICANS CHERISH FREEDOM. So they say. They praise it every Fourth of July. They solemnly put hands to hearts and pledge allegiance to the United States of America ..., with freedom and justice for all. They open every ball game by singing, Oer the land of the free. Indeed, they ...

America’s Hypocritical, Counterproductive Foreign Aid

by James Bovard May 1, 2002

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has been triumphantly shutting down and seizing the assets of one Muslim charity after another. In some cases, such as that of the Holy Land Foundation, the evidence appears based largely on accusations from informants who overheard speeches seven or eight years ago. In other cases, the Treasury Department is releasing ...

World War I and the Suppression of Dissent, Part 2

by Wendy McElroy May 1, 2002

Part 1 | Part 2 IN THE SUMMER OF 1905, labor radicals assembled in Chicago to found a new group the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It operated in competition with the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), then the most powerful labor group in the United States. As well as embodying socialism, the IWW embraced less-restrictive ...

Book Review: The Elusive Quest for Growth

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2002

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William Easterly (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002); 342 pages; $29.95. POVERTY, UNFORTUNATELY, is the natural condition of man. And through most of his time on earth, as best as historians can determine, his standard of living has been meager and poor. But slowly over the centuries certain ...

Freedom and Campaign-Finance Reform

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2002

Amidst not very much fanfare, President Bush has signed the new campaign-finance reform bill into law. This one closes the so-called soft-money loophole that permits large donations to be injected into federal campaigns through contributions to political parties. There are two big problems, however, with this most recent attempt to end corruption in the political process: First, it won’t work ...