Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

Limited Government and a Free Society, Part 1

by Gregory Bresiger December 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Presidential use of the executive order, along with its relative, the executive agreement, has become the “very definition of tyranny” and an affront to limited government. The use of executive orders has dramatically increased over time. George Washington issued about one executive order a year. However, by ...

The National Security-State and JFK, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Within a few hours of John Kennedy’s assassination, an anti-Castro organization in New Orleans called the DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil) issued a press release publicizing that Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just been arrested in connection with the assassination, was a communist. The allegation ...

Why Ruby Ridge Still Matters

by James Bovard November 1, 2017

In the wake of violent clashes between protesters last August in Charlottesville, many people demanded a federal crackdown on suspected dangerous extremists. The federal government has previously carried out similar heavy-handed suppression efforts with disastrous results. Rather than intellectually purifying the nation, such efforts are far more likely to turn nitwits into martyrs. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington’s ...