Freedom Daily Archive

Election Nonsense

by Sheldon Richman February 1, 2001

NO ONE WHO SPENT HOURS watching the coverage of the presidential election could have failed to notice the constant, almost desperate, invocation of two ideas: “Every vote counts” and “The will of the people must be respected.” It was almost as if the speakers were trying to convince themselves. I followed the presidential election ...

The IRS: Still a Grave Threat to Freedom

by James Bovard February 1, 2001

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION just succeeded in brow-beating Congress into giving the Internal Revenue Service one of the largest budget increases in the agency’s history. Clintonites had warned that, without a windfall for the revenuers, America was at grave risk of insufficient tax audits. Clinton persuaded much of the media ...

FDR — The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 11

by Ralph Raico February 1, 2001

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 It would be a mistake to think that the ...

Book Review: The Mystery of Capital

by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 2001

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando de Soto (New York: Random House, 2000); 243 pages; $24.95. CONSIDER THE TERM “the Third World.” Most people probably would conjure up in their minds the image of tens of millions of poverty-stricken people living in Asia, Africa, and South America possessing no means for ...

Let’s Retire the Drug War

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2001

Retired army general Barry McAfree has announced that he is now retiring from his position as America’s drug czar. If only he would take the war on drugs with him. Of all the domestic wars that the U.S. government has waged in the last several decades, the war on drugs has got to be the most immoral and destructive of ...

Food, Education, and Health Care

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2001

HAVE YOU EVER stayed up late at night worrying about whether there would be sufficient food in your community’s grocery stores the next day? Paced the floor over whether there would be the correct quantities of food for everyone? Fretted over whether rich people would buy up everything and leave ...

The Fundamental Rights of the European Union: Individual Rights or Welfare-State Privileges? Part 1

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2001

Thirty years ago, British economist William R. Lewis wrote a monograph for the Institute of Economic Affairs in London entitled Rome or Brussels...? His theme was the contrast between the original motives and purposes behind the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 through the Treaty of Rome and what the EEC had become by the early ...

Young People Aren’t Skeptical Enough!

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2001

Nearly everyone seems to agree on one thing: young people are tragically skeptical about politics. The subject came up in the third debate between Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush, both of whom bemoaned the political disillusionment of the young. Minnesota’s governor, Jesse Ventura, constantly ...

Clinton’s Kosovo Frauds

by James Bovard January 1, 2001

AS AMERICANS DEBATE what President Clinton’s legacy should be, too little attention is given to his remarks on Kosovo. The United States launched a war against a European nation largely at Clinton’s behest. Clinton’s war against Serbia epitomized his moralism, his arrogance, his refusal to respect law, and his fixation on proving his virtue ...

The Second Amendment Protects an Individual Right

by Benedict D. LaRosa January 1, 2001

THERE IS A popular misconception that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution refers to a collective right rather than an individual right. Both history and reason argue against this misinterpretation. The right to self- (and collective) defense does not originate with, nor is it dependent upon, the Second Amendment. Man has ...

Morals and the Welfare State, Part 4

by F.A. Harper January 1, 2001

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ISN’T IT a strange thing that if you select any three fundamentally moral persons and combine them into a collective for the doing of good, they are liable at once to become three immoral persons in their collective ...

Book Review: Feeling Your Pain

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2001

Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years by James Bovard (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); 426 pages; $26.95. WHEN THE HISTORY of the last decade of the 20th century is written sometime in the future, chroniclers of the 1990s will probably, at first, be tempted to emphasize the apparent triumphs of freedom around ...