Freedom Daily Archive

Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 5

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Among the most popular examples of anarchy cited by anarchy proponents is what is known as the “law merchant,” a body of law and custom that developed during the Middle Ages. Anarchists point to the widespread commercial transactions ...

Boy Scouts and the Love of Freedom

by James Bovard July 1, 2016

Some of my anarcho-libertarian tendencies arose thanks to the years I spent as a Boy Scout. Joining the Scouts was an easy decision, since my father was a Scoutmaster. Even without the family obligation, I might have signed up because Troop 52, based in Front Royal, Virginia, took many exhilarating excursions. My father had a knack for convincing boys ...

The Right to Hire and Fire

by Laurence M. Vance July 1, 2016

Do businesses have the right to hire whomever they want for a particular job? Most Americans would agree that they certainly do. But when you ask the same people whether businesses have the right to not hire whomever they don’t want for a particular job, most of them will say that it depends on the reason someone is not ...

The Legal Tender Cases

by David S. D'Amato July 1, 2016

In the December term of 1870, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a statute authorizing the issuance of U.S. notes (or “greenbacks”) and making those notes “legal tender in payment of all debts, public and private.” That statute, the Legal Tender Act of 1862, was signed into law less than a year after the introduction of the nation’s ...

Immigration Controls Are Socialist

by Jake Desyllas July 1, 2016

In the classical-liberal age of 19th-century Europe, there were no immigration controls. Here is how Gustav Stolper — a German economist, classical liberal, and an immigrant — described the world he had known: This economic and social system of Europe was predicated on a few axiomatic principles. These principles were considered safe and unshakable…. They were freedom of ...

Dallas, Texas: Nut Country, 1963

by Michael Swanson July 1, 2016

Dallas 1963, by Bill Minuteaglio and Steven Davis (Twelve, 2013), 384 pages. Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy, by Edward H. Miller (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 256 pages. History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it seems to rhyme and with the sudden and surprising rise of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries this year that may ...

Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 On June 27, 1986, the International Court of Justice entered a money judgment in favor of the Republic of Nicaragua and against the United States of America. Nicaragua had sued the United States for having illegally mined Nicaraguan ...

The TSA Treats Americans like Gitmo Detainees

by James Bovard June 1, 2016

If you use hand sanitizer when traveling, the Transportation Security Administration can badger you as if you were a terrorist suspect. The TSA is the biggest hassle most Americans will encounter when they fly. I learned that first-hand while flying home from Portland, Oregon, last Thanksgiving morning. I arrived at the airport two hours before my flight. As usual, I ...

Free Trade Is Fair Trade

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2016

As relayed by Harvard economics professor and chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, “The Princeton economist Alan Blinder once proposed Murphy’s Law of economic policy: ‘Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least ...

Praxeology and Hostile Action

by Joseph R. Stromberg June 1, 2016

Praxeology according to Mises Ludwig von Mises saw praxeology — “the general theory of human action” — as the foundation of proper economic reasoning. Starting from the self-evident fact that men “act” so as to substitute more satisfactory states of affairs for those now existing, he believed he could build the basic toolkit of economic science by working deductively from ...

Economic Liberty and The Slaughterhouse Cases

by David S. D'Amato June 1, 2016

Are economic rights and liberties among the “privileges or immunities” of citizenship protected by the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment? That was the simple question before the Supreme Court in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the opinion which is today almost uniformly denounced in the legal academy. Scholars of all political and interpretive commitments have come to reject Slaughterhouse as among the Court’s ...

The Making of a Great Entrepreneur

by Burton W. Folsom Jr. June 1, 2016

Andrew Carnegie: An Economic Biography, by Samuel Bostaph (Lexington Books, 2015), 124 pages. Andrew Carnegie, that remarkable steelmaker, was a key player in the rise of the United States to becoming a world power in the late 1800s. More than that, Carnegie was one of the most spectacular entrepreneurs in all of U.S. history — ranked number four ...