Freedom Daily Archive

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, ...

The Penalty of Surrender, Part 1

by Leonard Read April 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 These remarks, hardly more than a personal confession of faith, have their origin in an attitude or behavior commonly referred to as "compromising." The compromising attitude is exalted by many and deplored by only a few. As an example of the way this attitude is exalted, a certain business leader, perhaps the most publicized one in ...

Book Review: Critique of Interventionism

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1997

Critique of Interventionism by Ludwig von Mises, revised edition (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) 122 pages; $12.95. In the first decade of the 1800s, the French classical-liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say summarized in his book Treatise on Political Economy what became the general view of the majority of political economists throughout the early and middle decades of the ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 What would a free society look like? That is, what if everyone were free to live his life the way he wanted, so long as his conduct was peaceful, and free to enter into any mutually beneficial exchanges with anyone in the ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 3: The Federal Reserve and Price Level Stabilization in the 1920s

by Richard M. Ebeling March 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 | ...