Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

Unemployment Compensation: None of the Government’s Business

by Dave Honigman November 1, 1995

The New Deal ushered in a lot of socialistic ideas that still plague us, and one of the worst is the notion that the government should protect people against the loss of income. If a person suddenly finds himself without employment and, therefore, without a paycheck, "society" supposedly has an obligation to help support him ...

A Rembrandt among Commentators

by Michael Prowse November 1, 1995

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. This is such a wise saying that it might have been coined by Adam Smith or one of the great ...

Book Review: The Invasion of Japan

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1995

The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb by John Ray Skates (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); 276 pages; $27.95. On November 1, 1945, the invasion of Japan began, under the code name Operation Olympic. Under the joint command of General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, the United States armed forces started an assault on the southernmost of ...

Returning to a Constitutional Cabinet

by Doug Bandow October 1, 1995

Republicans have been running Congress for almost a year without addressing the most important issue facing us: the size and scope of government. If they are serious about change, they have to make much more serious reductions in federal spending. But cutting expenditures is not enough. Government is too expansive ...