Freedom Daily Archive

Compromise and Concealment-The Road to Defeat, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Twenty years ago, I was rummaging through the public library in my hometown of Laredo, Texas, and I came across four books entitled Essays on Liberty that had been published many years before by The Foundation for Economic ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 9: The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1997

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 | ...

Mandatory Volunteerism: Were Orwell Alive, He’d Die of Laughter

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 1997

President Clinton has hitched his wagon to one of the most abominable ideas to come down the pike in some time: community service as part of the school curriculum. Is there a single proposal packed with more fallacies? I doubt it. Where to begin? In getting ready for ...

Sovietizing American Virtue

by James Bovard September 1, 1997

"The higher interest involved in the life of the whole must set the limits and lay down the duties of the individual," according to Adolf Hitler. Hitler's views are generally unpopular in the United States. However, some of his moral dogmas may be staging a comeback. At the Volunteer Summit in ...

Service to Whom? Part 1

by Doug Bandow September 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 Service has a long and venerable history in the United States. It has perhaps become a cliché, but Americans' generosity and penchant to organize to meet community needs were both noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic, Democracy in America. And so it continues today. Three-quarters of American households give to charity. Some ...

Book Review: How Nations Grow Rich

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1997

How Nations Grow Rich: The Case for Free Trade by Melvyn Krauss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); 140 pages; $22.50. One of the frustrations in the study of economics is the discovery of how frequently the same fallacious ideas keep reappearing. Since the time of David Hume and Adam Smith, economists have demonstrated over and over again the mutual ...

Heaven’s Gate and the Cult of the Socialistic Welfare State, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 One of the primary characteristics of cults is the denial of reality. The ultimate example of this occurred in the Heaven's Gate cult: those cult members did not commit suicide; instead, they embarked on an exciting, intergalactic space adventure. In principle, denial of reality is no different for members in the cult of the socialistic ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 8: The Austrian Theory of Capital and Interest

by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 1997

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 | ...

Cutting Taxes Is Selfish

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 1997

Washington is a land of grand farce. People here routinely say things that no one believes, not even the person saying it. They do things they know are absurd. They can't help it. To stop is to confess what cannot be confessed: that the political enterprise is just a big con game. A classic example of what I mean took ...

Laundering: The Criminalization of Everything

by James Bovard August 1, 1997

Money-laundering statutes epitomize how the government has shirked going after violent criminals and instead is routinely impaling innocent citizens and penny-ante misfits in order to maximize its number of convictions. If the government cannot catch the guilty, at least it can scourge the innocent. In the same way that ...

Freedom in Transactions

by Fredric Bastiat August 1, 1997

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — Here are a million of human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast ...

Power Corrupts

by Ben Moreel August 1, 1997

When a person gains power over other persons the political power to force other persons to do his bidding when they do not believe it right to do so it seems inevitable that a moral weakness develops in the person who exercises that power. It may take time ...