Freedom Daily Archive

Classical Liberalism in the 21st Century: Freedom to Move

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 2001

FORTY YEARS AGO — August 10, 1961 — Nikita S. Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, attended a birthday party in Moscow for Sergei S. Verentsov, the Soviet marshal in charge of the missile program of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Khrushchev informed the celebrating assembly of leading Soviet ...

Winning the Battle and the War

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 2001

THE TRAGIC EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, have aroused a degree of sympathy for the victims and a demand for justice against the perpetrators that have not been seen in America in relation to any other event for many decades. But in this understandably emotional moment it is necessary for every American to step back and weigh carefully what should ...

Nature as Miser

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2001

A POPULIST IS SOMEONE WHO who believes scarcity is a capitalist plot. If only social arrangements were otherwise, he believes, mankind would enjoy a boundless cornucopia of goods and never want again. The populist thus assumes that our current economic institutions, such as the price system, are merely devices controlled by producers to withhold needed goods and to gouge ...

The Era of Big Government Being Over Is Over

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2001

It is hard not to notice a certain amount of glee in the aftermath of the catastrophe of September 11. Some pundits and commentators have taken this line: "So, where are all you government bashers now? Let's see one of you step forward and criticize big government now that we need it to save us from the terrorists." I'm paraphrasing, ...

Ruby Ridge: The Coverup Continues

by James Bovard November 1, 2001

THE DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUBY RIDGE CASE during the past year further illustrate why this is a landmark case defining how much deadly, arbitrary power federal agents shall possess over private citizens. The Ruby Ridge case involved the entrapment of Randy Weaver on firearms charges by an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), false ATF reports ...

The Immutable Nature of the Constitution

by Wesley Allen Riddle November 1, 2001

THERE’S A PHILOSOPHY ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION that’s killing it — ironically, by conceiving it as a so-called living thing, subject to reinterpretation by society. In our entire history, the view has been ascendant for only the last 40 years — a “contribution” largely of Earl Warren’s Court. Before that time, judges discerned the meaning of the Constitution from what ...

Book Review: Money and the Market

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 2001

Money and the Market: Essays on Free Banking by Kevin Dowd (New York/London: Routledge, 2001); 226 pages; $100. KEVIN DOWD IS ONE OF THE LEADING free-market monetary theorists today. Along with Lawrence H. White and George Selgin, he has helped to revive and refine the case for abolishing central banking and replacing it with a market-based competitive free-banking system. In 1976, Austrian ...

The War on Terrorism

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2001

With the publication of the first issue of Freedom Daily in January 1990, we made a vow that we have repeated every year since then: Never will we compromise that which we consider to be right and true. Since then, as long-time supporters and subscribers know, we have never hesitated to fulfill that vow, no matter what ...

Freedom, Security, and the Roots of Terrorism against the United States

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 2001

ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, I was in Bratislava, Slovakia, attending the annual meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association of classical liberals and advocates of the free market, established in 1947 by Friedrich A. Hayek. And like tens of millions of people around the world I was stunned and shocked when I turned on the television in ...

The New World Disorder

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 2001

AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE into the New World Order the only thing that looks new is the disorder on American soil wreaked by foreign terrorists on September 11. The atrocities of that day nearly defy the imagination. The assault by air on, and collapse of, the wondrous World Trade Center towers might have made a cinematic spectacle, but ...

Crises and Blind Faith in the State

by James Bovard October 1, 2001

LIKE A PHOENIX RISING FROM THE ASHES, Americans’ trust in government is soaring after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The number of people who trust the government to do the right thing has doubled since last year — and is now more than three times higher than in 1994. According to a Washington Post poll released on September 27, 64 ...

John Quincy Adams on U.S. Foreign Policy (1821)

by John Quincy Adams October 1, 2001

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, ...