Freedom Daily Archive

Repealing, Not Reforming, Social Security, Part 1

by Doug Bandow June 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 Social Security may be the most important domestic issue in Washington today. Everyone in the nation's capital is for a balanced budget, or so it seems. Even if these most election-minded of politicos were serious, however, there would remain a rather serious fly in the ointment. Politicians preaching a balanced budget want us to believe ...

Book Review: Hungry Ghosts

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 1997

Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine by Jasper Becker (New York: Free Press, 1996); 352 pages; $25. In 1994, Mao Zedong's personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, published The Private Life of Chairman Mao. Leading experts on Chinese communist history say that the book is authentic and accurate. He served Mao from 1955 until ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 In a primitive, economically poor society, a person has to do a lot of basic jobs just to survive. He has to be a master of many trades. But as a society becomes wealthier and more complex, people begin to specialize at ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 5: The Austrian Economists on the Origin and Purchasing Power of Money

by Richard M. Ebeling May 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 | ...

The Campaign Finance Red Herring [long]

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 1997

Campaign-finance reform is again on the public agenda. The scandals involving the Democratic National Committee and the taint surrounding House Speaker Newt Gingrich have renewed for the umpteenth time the calls for a drastic overhaul of how politics is funded in America. The DNC unilaterally announced it would no longer take money from noncitizens or foreign corporations. It also ...

The Latest Gun Control Fiasco

by James Bovard May 1, 1997

The nation's police forces are up in arms over a new federal gun control law that could strip thousands of them of their guns and jobs. Most police organizations have enthusiastically supported every gun control scheme President Clinton has put forward. Few Americans realized that such legislation almost always contained an exemption for the policemen themselves regarding their official ...

The Penalty of Surrender: Part II

by Leonard Read May 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 To me, "Thou shalt not steal" is a principle not because some sage of antiquity said so but because, in my own experience, it has been revealed as a principle which must be adhered to if we are not to perish from the face of the earth. To the ones who have not been graced ...

Book Review: The End of Welfare

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 1997

The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society by Michael Tanner (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996); 226 pages; $10.95. Thirty years ago, when the welfare-state programs of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty were first being implemented, the general consensus among the political elite and the intellectual community was that wise government, with sufficient funding, could lift the poor ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Karl Marx wrote that the value of an item is determined by how much labor goes into producing it. A diamond is valuable because of all the work that goes into mining it. Therefore, Marx argued, since value is created by the ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 4: Benjamin Anderson and the False Goal of Price-Level Stabilization

by Richard M. Ebeling April 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 | ...

The Nature of the Welfare State

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1997

Welfare-state programs have three central characteristics: plunder, deception, and obfuscation. Because those programs always effect a forcible transfer of wealth from one group of individuals to another, they involve what the great 19th-century economist Frederic Bastiat called "legalized plunder." The law sanctions stealing in these cases and is thereby changed from its original purpose, which was to protect people's ...

Police Brutality: A License to Maul

by James Bovard April 1, 1997

The Founding Fathers sought to create a "government of laws, not of men." A key principle of this doctrine is that no person is above the law — that every government employee must obey the same laws that government imposes on private citizens. Unfortunately, when it comes to police brutality, ...