Freedom Daily Archive

Central Planning, American Style

by Harold J. Lanfield July 1, 1995

The November 5, 1993, issue of The Narragansett Times announced the completion of the Narragansett Comprehensive Plan (NCP). Clarkson A. Collins, director of community development, said: "It's a very enthusiastic and aggressive plan that takes an awful lot on." My reaction: Eccccchhh! I can envision only an ominous future ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 5

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 When Adolf Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, came to Moscow on August 23, 1939, to sign the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Joseph Stalin hosted a late-night ...

Have We Abandoned Our Principles?

by Robert Chamberlain July 1, 1995

America was founded upon commonly held principles of right and wrong. Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution recognize these principles and enumerate several of them. Among these principles is the acknowledgment that we, as individuals, have certain unalienable rights — namely the rights to life, liberty, and the ...

Demystifying the State

by Wendy McElroy July 1, 1995

Mystification is the process by which the commonplace is elevated to the level of the divine by those who have a vested interest in its unassailability. Government is a perfect example of mystification at work. Government is a group of individuals organized for the purpose of extracting wealth and exerting ...

Horrors! Maybe the Schools Are Working Just Fine

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1995

Most people today are convinced that the public schools are failing. Dissatisfaction with public education is at an all-time high. But have the public schools really failed? That depends on what they were originally set up to do. In a profound sense, the public schools are not an American institution. They were ...

What’s Wrong with History Standards?

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1995

The latest fight on the nation's bloody educational battlefield is over the newly released national standards for teaching history to America's schoolchildren. The standards were drawn up by the federally funded National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles. They are part of ...

Resolving the School Prayer Conflict

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1995

The controversy about school prayer threatens to aggravate the already intense dispute over the role of public schools in America. Flush from their midterm election victory, the new Republican congressional majority is talking about launching a constitutional amendment to reverse the 30-year-old Supreme Court ruling barring formal prayer in ...

Just Say No to the War on Drugs

by Karen Selick July 1, 1995

Although I don't practice criminal law, I recently found myself waiting in a courtroom during a sentencing. The accused was a young man of perhaps twenty, who had rather imprudently sold six grams of cannabis resin to a police officer, pocketing the grand sum of about $100. He pleaded guilty, and the crown and ...

Book Review: A Terrible Revenge

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 1995

A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994); 179 pages;. $19.95. Speaking to a group of German officers over dinner in September 1941, Adolf Hitler explained: "It is the eternal law of nature that gives Germany as ...

The Power to Declare War — Who Speaks for the Constitution? Part 2

by Doug Bandow July 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 What conceivable justification is there for ignoring the Constitution's straightforward requirement regarding the power to declare war? Advocates of expansive executive war power — oddly enough, including some conservatives who claim to believe in a jurisprudence of "original intent" — have come up with a number of reasons to give ...

American Foreign Policy — The Turning Point, 1898–1919 Part 6

by Ralph Raico July 1, 1995

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 The vast changes that the First World War was to bring about began to occur even while the war was still going on. In February 1917, the Tsarist Russian state collapsed, and a provisional government was established. But ...

Book Review: Separating School & State

by Jim Powell July 1, 1995

Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families by Sheldon Richman (Fairfax, Virginia: The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994); 128 pages; $22.95 hardcover; $14.95 softcover. This is a thrilling book. Although there have been several powerful books on the education crisis, this one ventures where few have dared to ...