Freedom Daily Archive

The Deep Hurt

by Stephen Kinzer July 1, 2018

More than a century has passed since American hearts were first seized by the grand debate about overseas expansion. During that period, much of what anti-imperialists predicted has come to pass. The United States has become an actively interventionist power. It has projected military or covert power into dozens of countries on every continent except Antarctica. In many places, ...

How to Drain the Swamp: End the Failed War on Drugs, Part 2

by David Stockman July 1, 2018

Part 1 | Part 2 According to the most comprehensive investigations, the United States spends nearly $50 billion per year on the war on drugs — including about $34 billion annually at the state and local level for police, courts, and incarceration. By contrast, it is estimated that were drugs to be legalized and taxed at the ...

Legalize Drugs — All Drugs

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2018

In 1972, Newsweek published what must have been considered by many readers to be a shocking commentary on the drug war by libertarian Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman. Entitled “Prohibition and Drugs,” Friedman’s article called for the legalization of drugs — all drugs. Friedman made two primary libertarian arguments in favor of drug legalization: freedom and practicality. He wrote, On ethical ...

The Pro-War Media Deserve Criticism, Not Sainthood

by James Bovard June 1, 2018

The media nowadays are busy congratulating themselves for their vigorous criticism of Donald Trump. To exploit that surge of sanctimony, Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg rushed out The Post, a movie depicting an epic press battle with the Nixon administration. Critics raved over the film, which the New York Post enthusiastically labeled “journalism porn of the highest order.” Boston Public ...

Leave Social Security out of It

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2018

It was twenty-five years ago that the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress under Bill Clinton. Although it had minimal Republican support, current efforts to expand the FMLA’s provisions are being spearheaded by Republicans. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the FMLA “entitles eligible employees of covered employers to take unpaid, job-protected leave ...

Are Europeans Re-Thinking Gun Control?

by Scott McPherson June 1, 2018

The civil unrest of the 1960s threatened many Americans, particularly those living in major cities, and the urban population was exploding. Rising crime and particularly armed violent crime shocked and scared voters, and for more than two decades the Second Amendment was the scapegoat — an anachronism, “misinterpreted” by “gun nuts,” deserving of repeal. Draconian gun laws, including gun ...

How to Drain the Swamp: End the Failed War on Drugs, Part 1

by David Stockman June 1, 2018

Part 1 | Part 2 There are few more wasteful and inappropriate federal activities than the seizing and destroying of indoor and outdoor cannabis plants. At the peak of Washington’s pointless war on drugs in 2010 the DEA funded the eradication of 11 million marijuana plants, and has caused 125 million of such “weeds” to be pulled ...

Why Kennedy Had to Be Removed

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2018

The current, ongoing brouhaha over Russia helps to show explain why the U.S. national-security establishment removed President John F. Kennedy from office in the regime-change operation that took place on November 22, 1963. Yes, I know the official version that we are all expected to adhere to: that it is just inconceivable that the U.S. national-security establishment would initiate one ...

Your Tax Dollars Bankroll Afghan Child-Molesters

by James Bovard May 1, 2018

Donald Trump was hailed by the media last August when he announced he was sending more U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan. A Washington Post editorial praised his “principled realism” and saluted “a rare but welcome story of self-correction” (since Trump had portrayed Afghanistan as a lost cause when he was a presidential candidate). A New York Daily News ...

Mencken’s Plan, Read’s Rule

by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2018

H.L. Mencken and Leonard Read couldn’t have been more different, but each of them said some important things about life in a free society. Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was born in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, lived nearly all of his life in the house he grew up in, and died in his bed. He was a third-generation Baltimorean. Although ...

Ralph Raico: Master Historian

by Joseph R. Stromberg May 1, 2018

The death of historian Ralph Raico on December 13, 2016, robbed us of an erudite and insightful scholar whose long life made him witness to (and analyst of) massive changes in American society involving state building, imperialist wars, and loss of effective freedom. Born in 1936, Raico attended Ludwig von Mises’s famous New York seminar and translated Mises’s Liberalism ...

The Case against Schooling

by George Leef May 1, 2018

The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan (Princeton University Press, 2018, 395 pages). Almost every book on education policy (and I have read a great many of them) springs from the set of assumptions that education “experts” embrace: that schooling builds our stock of knowledge and ...