Freedom Daily Archive

Book Review: Shakedown

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 1996

Shakedown: How the Government Screws You from A to Z by James Bovard (New York: Viking, 1995); 132 pages; $14.95. So you think you are free! So you think that you possess certain constitutional rights that safeguard your liberty from abusive intrusion from the oppressive hand of government! Well, think again! Most of us believe that we have freedom of speech. A newspaper ...

Trial by Jury

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 1995

After a nine-month trial, the jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. There was anger and outrage among most white Americans. The evidence clearly seemed to point to the defendant's guilt. The feeling was that a jury composed largely of black Americans acquitted Simpson simply due to his race. Amidst all ...

Practicing the Principle of Freedom — At Home and Abroad

by Richard M. Ebeling December 1, 1995

As an advocate of individual freedom, I consider all forms of government interference in people's lives, other than those minimally essential for the protection of life, liberty, and property, to be morally wrong, politically harmful, and economically counterproductive. As part of that political philosophy, I believe that the government ...

Individual Rights or Civil Rights?

by Sheldon Richman December 1, 1995

Civil rights and affirmative action are getting their closest reexamination in years. Unfortunately, the reexamination is not close enough. With scant exception, no one is willing to go to the core of the issue and condemn the entire rotten regime for what it is — massive violation of individual rights. The way civil rights are defined today confronts us ...

The Minimum Wage

by James M. Liebler December 1, 1995

The standard political reason for wanting to raise the minimum wage is to aid the downtrodden, especially minority groups, by increasing their earnings and hopefully their employment opportunities. However, this move will not help these people; it will in fact only hurt them. Instead of raising their income, the actual effect of the law is to cut off the ...

The Magic Bullet That Stops Tyranny in Its Tracks

by Don Doig December 1, 1995

Governments at all levels are raging out of control, trampling the rights of the people, escalating the attack on the Bill of Rights seemingly without any recourse available to the people. Until recently, it has not been widely appreciated that for the last hundred years, we have been ...

An Essay on the Trial by Jury

by Lysander Spooner December 1, 1995

For more than six hundred years — that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215, — there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of ...

Vigilant Distrust, Part 1

by John C. Sparks December 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 Free enterprise. Familiar words for this class. Enterprise is an undertaking marked by its difficulty, requiring action that is bold, energetic, and venturesome in order to accomplish it. I need not remind you that "free" as in free enterprise does not mean something without cost. Instead "free" means that the person undertaking the task ...

Book Review: The Vision of the Anointed

by Richard M. Ebeling December 1, 1995

The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy by Thomas Sowell (New York: Basic Books, 1995); 305 pages; $25. In an article entitled "The Attitude of the Intellectuals to the Market Economy," published in The Owl in January 1951, French social theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel tried to explain the anticapitalist bias of many in the intellectual ...

The Repeal of Social Security

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 1995

Sixty years ago — on August 14, 1935 — President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act. It was one of the major political events that transformed the United States into a welfare state. It was a law that enabled government to use the force of taxation to ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 9

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 The Yalta Conference formalized the configuration of the post-World War II era for almost half a century. It codified the division of Europe into East and ...

Abolish the Federal Cultural Agencies

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 1995

According to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, "This is an ominous time for those of use who care for the arts in America. A misguided, misinformed effort to eliminate public support for the arts not only threatens irrevocable damage to our cultural institutions but also to our sense of ourselves and what we stand for as a people." That is ...