Freedom Daily Archive

The Failure of Socialism and Lessons for America, Part 1

by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 1993

Part 1 | Part 2 The world is watching the spectacle of Russia and the other captive nations of the former Soviet Union trying to free themselves from their seventy-five-year experiment in socialism. The bankruptcy of the system is accepted by practically everyone. The economies of the former Soviet republics are in shambles. Civil wars and ethnic violence have ...

Freeing the Education Market

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1993

Many a profound word is spoken unwittingly. Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office once issued a paper stating that the literacy rate in Massachusetts has never been as high as it was before compulsory schooling was instituted. Before 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to force ...

Book Review: Reinventing Politics

by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 1993

Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel by Vladimir Tismaneanu (New York: The Free Press, 1992); 312 pages; $24.95. Europe lasted for more than four decades. And each of the communist regimes constructed in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania were, in its essentials, created in ...

Speculation, Law, and the Market Process

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 1993

After Hurricane Andrew devastated the southern part of Florida, the state's attorney general threatened to prosecute "price-gougers" and speculators for charging exorbitant prices for food, ice, plywood, and other essential items. The Power of government officials to regulate prices and to punish speculators is not new. It stretches back centuries. ...

Individual Liberty and Civil Society

by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 1993

In 1819, the French classical liberal, Benjamin Constant, delivered a lecture in Paris entitled, "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Modems." He drew his audience's attention to the fact that in the world of ancient Greece, "the aim of the ancients was the sharing of power among the citizens of the fatherland: this is ...

The Speculator As Hero

by Victor Niederhoffer February 1, 1993

I am a speculator. I own seats on the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange. When my daughters ask me if my job is as important as the butcher's, the doctor's or the scientist's, I answer that the speculator is a hero, and has been throughout history. Some speculators are discoverers like Christopher Columbus, creators like Henry Ford, ...

The Slaughterhouse Cases

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 1993

1869, the Louisiana legislature enacted a statute granting seventeen people the exclusive right to operate the only slaughterhouse in Orleans. All other slaughterhouses were required to close down. Any butcher who desired to continue his trade would be permitted to do so in the new slaughterhouse and would be ...

Book Review: A Nation of Victims

by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 1993

A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character by Charles J. Sykes (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992); 289 pages; $22.95. One of the reasons that socialism came to have such a great appeal to many in the 19th and 20th centuries was that it offered a powerful rationale for an individual to avoid responsibility for the consequences of ...

America’s Wars and the Los Angeles Riots, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 1993

Part 1 | Part 2 Whether the jury's verdict in the Rodney King case was a miscarriage of justice is beside the point. The real point is the shocking reaction to the verdict by many in the black and Hispanic communities. No mereacquittal can engender the response that was manifested in Los Angeles. The anger and outrage of the ...

Historical Capitalism vs. The Free Market

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 1993

During the dark days of Nazi collectivism in Europe, the German economist Wilhelm Röpke used the haven of neutral Switzerland for continuing to write and lecture on the moral and economic principles of the free society. "Collectivism," he warned, was "the fundamental and moral danger of the West." The triumph ...

Wanted: A Real Deregulatory Revolution

by Doug Bandow January 1, 1993

Jennifer Crafts exemplifies the best of American entrepreneurship. She wanted both to work and to spend more time with A.J., her infant son. So she opened a restaurant-A.J.'s Place- and put A.J. in a playpen next to the kitchen. The customers were almost as happy as Jennifer to have him around. Explained regular Richard Reynolds, ...

Book Review: Laogai – The Chinese Gulog

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 1993

Laogai—The Chinese Gulag by Hongda Harry Wu (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, Inc., 1992); 247 pages; $34.95. The world has marveled for over ten years at the economic progress in communist China. The collective farms were transformed into private family enterprises. The Communist Party declared that "to be rich is glorious," and ...