Freedom Daily Archive

Merle Haggard and the Lost “Free Life”

by James Bovard June 1, 2024

“Is the best of the free life behind us now?” Merle Haggard asked in a haunting 1982 country music hit song. Nine years earlier, Haggard had scoffed at potheads and draft dodgers in a White House performance of his song “Okie from Muskogee” for President Richard Nixon. But reflecting widespread loss of faith in the American dream ...

What Trump Didn’t Say about NATO

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2024

During his first presidential campaign in 2016, former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump berated NATO member counties for failing to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of GDP. He took some heat for his remarks but never seriously questioned the existence of the military alliance. Now Trump has done it again — and then some. At ...

The Global Economy: Free Trade versus Managed Trade

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2024

In 1831, Sir Henry Parnell (1776–1842), a long-time chairman of the Financial Committee of the House of Commons, published On Financial Reform, in which he made the case for freedom of trade at a time when trade protectionism was mostly the order of the day in Great Britain, especially in agriculture: If once men were allowed to take their own ...

“Who Will Build the Roads?” Part 1

by Wendy McElroy June 1, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Everyone who argues for the free market over government involvement in the economy has heard this common comeback: “Who will build the roads?” Sometimes, the question is sincere and deserves to be answered with patience. Much of the time, however, it is the dismissal of a complex argument and is intended ...

Border Tyranny

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 5, 2024

Libertarian advocates of immigration controls always focus solely on the issue of immigration controls and never on the police state that comes with them. That’s because the police-state aspects of an immigration-control system make them extremely uncomfortable given the fact that a police state is the opposite of a libertarian society. I believe that it’s important to constantly remind people ...

Time to Separate Piety and Politics

by James Bovard May 5, 2024

The First Amendment of the Constitution specifies, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In Washington, the “free exercise thereof” perennially includes politicians exploiting religion to sanctify themselves and all their power grabs. Piety with a side of eggs One of the most brazen if not most shameless “free exercise thereof” examples ...

Why Libertarians Loathe Tariffs

by Laurence M. Vance May 5, 2024

Former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump loves tariffs. In his 2011 book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, Trump included as part of his five-part tax policy “a 20 percent tax for importing goods.” During his first campaign for president, he called for a 35 percent tariff on cars and trucks imported from a ...

Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian Theory of Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle, Part 3

by Richard M. Ebeling May 5, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 When the English-language edition of Ludwig von Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit was published 90 years ago, in 1934, the world was in the midst of the Great Depression. The American stock market crash in October 1929 soon snowballed into a severe economic downtown in 1930 and 1931 ...

Social Justice Fallacies

by George Leef May 5, 2024

Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books, 2023) Now 93, Thomas Sowell continues to produce excellent work — work that would help the United States escape from the grip of statism if people would heed him. Sowell has just published a new book, Social Justice Fallacies, and it contains a wealth of common sense about that ...

Which Way Forward for America?

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2024

With the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the American people brought into existence the most unusual way of life in history, one that led to the greatest economic miracle that mankind has ever seen. Americans not only discovered the solution to poverty but also experienced the greatest outburst of charity in history. Ironically, when the delegates met at the Constitutional ...

The World Economic Forum Is Still Conspiring Against Your Freedom

by James Bovard April 1, 2024

Last January, humanity’s elite gathered again in Davos, Switzerland, to plan out the rest of our lives. World Economic Forum (WEF) honchos are morally superior because they are devoted to destroying your freedom to save the Earth, or at least to safeguard plant habitat. Sixty heads of government from around the world attended, as did endless Lear Jet–loads of multilateral ...

America Needs a Great Reset

by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2024

For several years now, and especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 “pandemic” fiasco, we have been told that the world needs a “great reset.” World Economic Forum (WEF) executive chairman Klaus Schwab famously said in June of 2020: “The COVID- 19 crisis has shown us that our old systems are not fit any more for the 21st century. ...