Freedom Daily Archive

Fiscal Insanity

by Laurence M. Vance July 1, 2024

Created in 1973, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) serves as the conservative caucus of House Republicans. Its purpose is “to bring like-minded House members together to promote a strong, principled legislative agenda that will limit government, strengthen our national defense, boost America’s economy, preserve traditional values and balance our budget.” The RSC “ensures that conservatives have a powerful voice ...

The Political Economy of Natural versus Contrived Inequalities

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2024

To discuss the political economy of natural versus contrived inequalities requires some explanation of what is meant by “natural,” “contrived,” and “inequalities.” The use of the word “natural” has had a long, if sometimes controversial, history in economics over the last two and half centuries. When using this term, the French Physiocrats in the eighteenth century meant that along ...

“Who Will Build the Roads?” Part 2

by Wendy McElroy July 1, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The United States Pharmacopeia is updated and published to this day. The organization has remained a privately funded nonprofit for over two centuries, but it does now currently cooperate closely with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is interesting to note, however, that it took the government 86 years ...

The Kennedy Assassination: Fraudulent Photos, X-Rays, and Film

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2024

I highly recommend a new book on the Kennedy assassination entitled The Final Analysis by David W. Mantik and Jerome R. Corsi. It provides a critically important evidentiary building block that reinforces other circumstantial evidence and establishes beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal culpability of the national-security establishment in JFK’s assassination. First of all, however, let me provide some detailed ...

Merle Haggard and the Lost “Free Life”

by James Bovard June 1, 2024

“Is the best of the free life behind us now?” Merle Haggard asked in a haunting 1982 country music hit song. Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song “Okie from Muskogee” for President Richard Nixon. But reflecting widespread loss of faith in the American dream ...

What Trump Didn’t Say about NATO

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2024

During his first presidential campaign in 2016, former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump berated NATO member counties for failing to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP. He took some heat for his remarks but never seriously questioned the existence of the military alliance. Now Trump has done it again — and then some. At ...

The Global Economy: Free Trade versus Managed Trade

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2024

In 1831, Sir Henry Parnell (1776–1842), a long-time chairman of the Financial Committee of the House of Commons, published On Financial Reform, in which he made the case for freedom of trade at a time when trade protectionism was mostly the order of the day in Great Britain, especially in agriculture: If once men were allowed to take their own ...

“Who Will Build the Roads?” Part 1

by Wendy McElroy June 1, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Everyone who argues for the free market over government involvement in the economy has heard this common comeback: “Who will build the roads?” Sometimes, the question is sincere and deserves to be answered with patience. Much of the time, however, it is the dismissal of a complex argument and is intended ...

Border Tyranny

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 5, 2024

Libertarian advocates of immigration controls always focus solely on the issue of immigration controls and never on the police state that comes with them. That’s because the police-state aspects of an immigration-control system make them extremely uncomfortable given the fact that a police state is the opposite of a libertarian society. I believe that it’s important to constantly remind people ...

Time to Separate Piety and Politics

by James Bovard May 5, 2024

The First Amendment of the Constitution specifies, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In Washington, the “free exercise thereof” perennially includes politicians exploiting religion to sanctify themselves and all their power grabs. Piety with a side of eggs One of the most brazen if not most shameless “free exercise thereof” examples ...

Why Libertarians Loathe Tariffs

by Laurence M. Vance May 5, 2024

Former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump loves tariffs. In his 2011 book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, Trump included as part of his five-part tax policy “a 20 percent tax for importing goods.” During his first campaign for president, he called for a 35 percent tariff on cars and trucks imported from a ...

Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian Theory of Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle, Part 3

by Richard M. Ebeling May 5, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 When the English-language edition of Ludwig von Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit was published 90 years ago, in 1934, the world was in the midst of the Great Depression. The American stock market crash in October 1929 soon snowballed into a severe economic downtown in 1930 and 1931 ...