Freedom Daily Archive

Money on the Table

by Richard W. Fulmer January 1, 2017

There’s an old economists’ joke about two university professors who are walking through the school’s cafeteria. The first professor, an engineer, points to an empty table and says, “Look, someone left a twenty-dollar bill.” The second professor, an economist, replies, “Nonsense. Someone would have already picked it up.” The point of the joke is that, in a free market, explanations ...

Freedom in Transactions

by Fredric Bastiat January 1, 2017

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — here are a million human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities that must enter tomorrow through the ...

End the Fed

by George Leef January 1, 2017

Who Needs the Fed? by John Tamny (Encounter Books, 2016); 224 pages. I really don’t like to start a review with a quibble, but in this instance, I must. My quibble is with the title of the book, which makes it seem as though it is aimed only at knocking out support for the Federal Reserve ...

Patriotism and Conscience: The Edward Snowden Affair

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2016

The Edward Snowden case provides a good example of how the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state has warped and perverted the morals, values, principles, and consciences of the American people. Snowden is the former NSA official who revealed the national-security establishment’s top-secret surveillance scheme to the American people and the rest of ...

How Food Stamps Subverted Democracy, Part 1

by James Bovard December 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The federal government is now feeding more than 100 million Americans. The vast increase in dependency fundamentally changes the relationship of Washington to the citizenry. The more Americans rely on handouts, the more difficult it becomes to roll back politicians’ power over those who do not. There was no ...

Workplace Smoking

by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2016

While making a brief trip recently to a place of business in a local outdoor mall in central Florida, I noticed that a new sign had been posted on the information board in the middle of one of the sidewalks: “Smoking in Workplaces Is Prohibited by Law.” The sign was gone the next week, replaced by an ad for ...

The New Deal, Part 2: Foreign Policy

by Joseph R. Stromberg December 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 As noted in part 1, the New Deal was in serious political trouble by 1937. (See Frederic Sanborn, “Collapse of the New Deal,” in W.A. Williams, ed., Shaping of American Diplomacy, II.) Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace’s book New Frontiers (1934) was an early sign of the administration’s turn toward foreign markets as ...

The Tyranny of the Distance

by Matthew Harwood December 1, 2016

The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the Staff of The Intercept (Simon & Schuster, 2016); 256 pages. Last summer, the Obama administration finally made good on its promise to provide some transparency to its targeted killing program — well, sort of. On a Friday before the long July Fourth ...

A Military Coup in America?

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2016

Ever since I started writing about the assassination of John F. Kennedy several years ago, people have been asking me why I do it. Since the event happened 53 years ago this month, what possible relevance could the assassination have to Americans living today? Even if Kennedy had been the victim of a conspiracy, wouldn’t the malefactors probably be ...

The Great Goober Train Wreck of 2016

by James Bovard November 1, 2016

The history of federal peanut policy is the perfect antidote to anyone who still believes that Congress could competently manage a lemonade stand. Federal spending for peanut subsidies will have risen eightfold between last year and next year — reaching almost a billion dollars and approaching the total value of the peanut harvest. This debacle is only the latest ...

The Change America Needs Is Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance November 1, 2016

The French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808–1890) famously said that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” This epigram is a perfect description of the American electoral process. Americans elect a new president every four years. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives have a two-year term. U.S. senators are elected for six years. That means that ...

The New Deal, Part 1: Domestic Policy

by Joseph R. Stromberg November 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 Today, few Americans are left from the Greatest Generation (a phrase which my father, born in 1912, would have seen as obvious propaganda). There are more, perhaps, who experienced the New Deal directly as very small children. Most of us know it only from history, family lore, popular culture, film, and (yes) ...