Freedom Daily Archive

Electing Our Daddy

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 1992

For 125 years, the American people elected a president. During that time, the powers of the president were extremely limited. The American people did not permit the passage, for example, of income taxation, drug laws, and welfare laws. They also refused to permit a large standing military force. And they did not allow their government to engage in foreign ...

Some Warnings for the East: What Former Socialist Countries Need to Know

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1992

For the last three years, the Eastern European countries and the republics of the former Soviet Union have been trying to escape from their socialist past. Democratic governments have been elected, and market reforms have been promised. Yet, in each of these countries, the socialist economic structures still exist ...

The Dead End of Head Start

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. November 1, 1992

Head Start is the only one of Lyndon Baines Johnson's welfare programs that works, or so we're told. The New York Times calls it "the Great Society jewel." And our Republican president, George Bush, asked for "record spending" on Head Start in his new budget. He even crawled around on the floor at a Head Start center, talking ...

Liberty’s Guilded Door

by Wall Street Journal November 1, 1992

Hong Kong's administration calls it a success to have finally deterred Vietnamese boat people from seeking asylum in the British Crown Colony. Hong Kong's authorities announced proudly that for the first time in seven years, the number of new Vietnamese refugee arrivals in Hong Kong dropped to zero. The reason is not that Communist Vietnam has suddenly become a realm ...

Book Review: Forbidden Grounds

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1992

Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws by Richard A. Epstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1992); 530 pages; $39.95. In the 1960s, many conservatives opposed the civil-rights acts and forced-integration laws that were passed. Some of these conservatives may have been racists who ...

The Crisis in Conservatism

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 1992

The end of the Cold War has brought a deep crisis to the conservative movement in America. For over four decades, the communist threat was the glue that bound conservatives together. However, now that communism no longer poses a direct threat to the United States, deep cracks have appeared in the conservative movement. Why? The reason is that conservatives have ...

Forward to the Past: From Central Planning to the Redistributive State

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 1992

At the dawn of the 20th century, in 1899, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon looked into the future and described "the immediate fate of the nation which shall first see the triumph of Socialism....The people will of course commence by despoiling and then shooting a few thousands of employers, ...

The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of Classical Liberalism, Part 2: Triumphs and Challenges

by Ralph Raico October 1, 1992

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 As the nineteenth century began, classical liberalism — or just liberalism as the philosophy of freedom was then known — was the specter haunting Europe — and the world. In every advanced country the liberal movement was active. Drawn mainly from the middle classes, it included people from widely contrasting religious ...

Book Review: The Development Frontier

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 1992

The Development Frontier: Essays in Applied Economics by Peter Bauer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); 241 pages; $24.95. Socialism has had two playgrounds on which to exercise its destructive force. One has been in the former Soviet-bloc countries, which now stand in disarray and which now are attempting to recover from ...

JFK, the CIA, and Conspiracies

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 1992

The Oliver Stone movie JFK resulted in cries of indignation and outrage from many Americans. Why? Why do so many People consider it beyond the realm of reasonable political certainty that the president's assassination was planned by top-level United States governmental officials? I do not know who killed John F. Kennedy or who planned his murder. But I ...

The Predilection for Planning: National Industrial Policy, Again

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1992

It seems that no matter how many times governmental planning is implemented and fails, the temptation to try to design the economic system through political means remains irresistible. One of the reasons for this was explained in the 1880s by the English economist Walter Bagehot, who warned, "All Governments like to interfere; it elevates their position to make out ...

The CIA

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 1992

In a 1954 speech to the Conservative Society of Yale Law School, Felix Morley, a founder of the conservative weekly newspaper Human Events, indicted United States foreign policy as "imperial." The U.S. policy, he said, "demands that concentration and centralization of power which has characterized every empire since the days of Nebuchadnezzar." The "enormous ...