Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

Book Review: The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America

by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 1997

The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America by Paul Craig Roberts and Karen Lafollette Araujo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); 214 pages; $25. The mass media has focused public attention on the dramatic attempts to implement market-oriented reforms in Eastern Europe, Russia, and other countries in the former Soviet Union. Less attention has been given to another part of the ...

Heaven’s Gate and the Cult of the Socialistic Welfare State, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 Several months ago, police discovered the bodies of members of a cult known as Heaven's Gate. The cult members had taken their own lives, apparently under the belief that they would be transported to a space ship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet that would take them on an intergalactic space trip. The Heaven's Gate episode ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 7: Friedrich A. Hayek and the Destabilizing Influence of a Stable Price Level

by Richard M. Ebeling July 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 | ...

Stop the Flood of Taxpayer Money

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1997

Again this year, spring was heralded by swollen rivers in the Midwest. The overflowing Ohio River and Red River have caused heartbreak and millions of dollars of damage in several states in the region. And once again a colossal public policy blunder was committed: the handing out of millions of taxpayer dollars in relief assistance. It would be too much ...