Freedom Daily Archive

The Mirage of Administrative Justice

by James Bovard July 1, 1999

The trademark of modern political thinking is faith in discretionary power wielded by benevolent politicians and administrators and in letting government employees treat private citizens as they think best. We have far more federal agencies than we used to have, and they are under less restraint than what they ...

NATO’s Balkans Disaster and Wilsonian Warmongering, Part 1

by Doug Bandow July 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 When ethnic Albanian guerrillas originally rejected the Rambouillet peace settlement for Kosovo fashioned by the Clinton administration, a Clinton official raged, "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with to do something entirely in their own interest — which is to say yes to an interim agreement — and they defy us." With ...

Book Review: Hayek

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 1999

Hayek: A Commemorative Album compiled by John Raybould (London: Adam Smith Institute, 1999); 120 pages; $19.95. I first met Friedrich A. Hayek in 1975, the year after he received the Nobel Prize in economics. I had had the exceptionally good fortune to be awarded summer fellowships for 1975 and 1977 at the Institute for Humane Studies when their offices were ...

Warfare-Welfare in Yugoslavia

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 1999

More than 80 years ago, the United States entered World War I with the express purposes of making the world safe for democracy and making that war the one that would end all future European wars. The intervention was a radical departure from the foreign policy that George Washington had enunciated in his Farewell Address and which had been ...

Do Our Rights Come from the Constitution?

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 1999

It is commonly believed that the rights of the American people come from the Constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout history, the standard belief was that people were unconditionally subject to the commands of their government. If the king ordered a person to leave his family to fight in a war thousands of miles away, that person ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 30: The Gold Standard as Government-Managed Money

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 ...

Bill Clinton: World Cop

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 1999

In a major foreign-policy address delivered a few months back in San Francisco, President Bill Clinton solemnly affirmed that everything everywhere in the world is the business of the United States. If you ever entertained the thought that we Americans should be free just to live our lives, raise our families, and participate voluntarily in our communities — forget ...

Sabotaging Privacy for Political Profit

by James Bovard June 1, 1999

Federal regulators announced last December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, a brazen scheme to convert banks into conspirators against their depositors. The "Know Your Customer" rules were a landmark in the history of the attempted subversion of American privacy and property rights. But enough Americans rallied — at least temporarily — to block this power grab. The proposed rules vastly expanded ...

FDR – The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 7

by Ralph Raico June 1, 1999

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 Two major grounds are put forward nowadays for the ...

Book Review: Freedom in Chains

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 1999

Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen by James Bovard (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); 326 pages; $26.95. Are you better off than you were 25 years ago? Listening to critics from the left, the impression would be created that Americans are experiencing a falling standard of living and facing immanent mass ...

A Libertarian Visits Cuba, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Last March, I spent a week in Cuba, which turned out to be one of my most fascinating experiences. I had applied for a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury to travel to Cuba to conduct an informal study of the ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 29: The Gold Standard in the 19th Century

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 1999

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 ...