Freedom Daily Archive

Limited Government and a Free Society, Part 3

by Gregory Bresiger February 1, 2018

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Franklin D. Roosevelt was up for reelection in 1940. Toward the end of the election campaign, wanting to reassure the considerable isolationist sentiment, he promised not to send U.S. troops to Europe. “I have said this before. But I shall say it again and again and again. Your ...

Trump, Free Speech, and Libertarianism

by Scott McPherson February 1, 2018

There is a modest amount of crossover between populism and libertarianism — as there is between libertarianism and other political philosophies — but leftists and progressives should hesitate before lumping us into the same category. For the most part populists are just big-government conservatives — which means they have more in common with the political Left than with us ...

The Lies and Hypocrisy of the Civil War

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2018

More than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said to be racists. The feelings ...

Red-Green Delusions on Soviet-Bloc History

by James Bovard January 1, 2018

The New York Times is running a series of “Red Century” articles extolling some of the virtues of communism on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Last August, the Times showcased a Yale University lecturer rhapsodizing about the Soviets’ environmental record in a piece headlined, “Lenin’s Eco-Warriors.” The piece hailed Lenin as “a longtime enthusiast for hiking and ...

Paycheck Plus Welfare

by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2018

Just as a rose by any other name would still smell just as sweet, so welfare by any other name still reeks of dependency, taxation, wealth redistribution, fraud, redundancy, inefficiency, and income- transfer payments. Yet, pleas to maintain the welfare state never cease. And some even want to expand it. Like MDRC, “a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research ...

Limited Government and a Free Society, Part 2

by Gregory Bresiger January 1, 2018

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Unfortunately, the classical-liberal tradition that Carl Schurz represented is almost gone today. The men and women who supported it were consistent opponents of the imperial presidency, no matter the party in power. (Schurz, for example, was a Republican who broke with the Republican Grant administration.) That’s because the ...

Exporting Roosevelt’s New Deal through Aid, Investment, and Threat of War

by Wendy McElroy January 1, 2018

The Marshall Plan is more than a historical event — it has become a modern myth. As such, it may be mostly true or mostly false, but it exercises a powerful hold over reality. And the perceived success of the Marshall Plan has influenced American policy since the late 1940s. — Tyler Cowen The European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall ...

The Founding Fathers’ “Great Rule” for U.S. Foreign Policy

by Elizabeth Cobbs January 1, 2018

People who don’t get heard have a tendency to shout. Eventually they get mad. For too long, foreign-policy experts have stuck their fingers in their ears when confronted by citizens ambivalent about playing global police officer. Republican Donald Trump is channeling their voices through his electric bullhorn, whipping up the crowd and questioning the validity of institutions like NATO. Regardless ...

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2017

James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, wrote that of all the enemies to liberty, war is the greatest. What he meant by that is that governments inevitably use wars and other crises and emergencies to centralize and expand their powers over the citizenry. Thus, in the process of claiming to keep the citizenry safe from external threats, ...

Guilt by Musical Association

by James Bovard December 1, 2017

Should the feds be permitted to treat anyone who is not a choirboy like a criminal suspect? Unfortunately, local, state, and federal agencies have a long history of targeting, harassing, and entrapping fans of untraditional music. Because so many innocuous activities have become criminalized in recent decades, it has never been easier for the feds to tar any group ...

The Problem with Conservatism

by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2017

Nikolai G. Wenzel has a problem with conservatism. A libertarian, Wenzel is a Research Fellow at the University of Paris Law School’s Center for Law & Economics and the coauthor (with conservative Nathan W. Schlueter) of Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate (Stanford Economic and Finance, 2017). This book is the only “debate book” between ...

Smith Act Tyranny Against Communists

by Wendy McElroy December 1, 2017

When a state officially declares war on another state, it unofficially declares war on a second front: domestic dissidents. The dynamics of the latter can be seen by tracking one of the most powerful phenomena of the last century: the Red Scare(s). Anti-communist hysteria followed World War I and did not cease until the fall of the Soviet Union ...