Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 There are two important points that one should recognize about the anarchy paradigm. First, under anarchy, there would no longer be a United States of America, and no longer would there be any U.S. citizens. There also ...

Bipartisan Battering of Freedom

by James Bovard May 1, 2016

For more than 40 years, Republicans have been promising to cut federal spending. In the same period, federal outlays have inched up by a few trillion dollars. But the Grand Old Party continues singing the same song — though voters may finally be losing confidence in the opposition team. The latest pratfall occurred last December, once again illustrating that Republican ...

Conservatism and Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2016

When conservative politicians are trying to get the votes of libertarians and “libertarian-leaning” Republicans, they often tout the supposed affinity between conservatism and libertarianism. They claim that there is a conservative and libertarian confluence of thought on many issues. They maintain that because the real enemy of conservatism and libertarianism is liberalism, conservatives and libertarians stand on common ground. ...

Regulatory Tyranny

by David S. D'Amato May 1, 2016

Having considered the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1937 case of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish in the March 2016 issue of Future of Freedom, a case in which the jurisprudential tide turned in favor of deference to comprehensive social and economic legislation, a look at the earlier case of Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States is in ...

The Revolution of Rising Expectations

by Wendy McElroy May 1, 2016

Starving peasants storm the Bastille because oppression has driven them beyond the limits of human endurance. It is the quintessential image of political revolution. But what if it is wrong? Or what if there is an equally powerful force that also creates revolution and contradicts this received image? The phrase “a revolution of rising expectations” became popular after World War ...

The Empire versus Little America

by Bill Kauffman May 1, 2016

Former Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright said in 1967, “The price of empire is America’s soul, and that price is too high.” War, expansion, the maintenance of a large standing army: these corrupt a country, as poets from James Russell Lowell to Wendell Berry have tried to tell us. The Vietnam or Iraq War may level villages across the sea but ...

Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 In 1954 The Foundation for Economic Education published a book entitled Government: An Ideal Concept, by its founder and president, Leonard E. Read. In the book, which was critical of the anarchy paradigm, Read pointed out ...

Obama’s Forgotten Victims

by James Bovard April 1, 2016

The White House kept one seat vacant in the gallery during Obama’s State of the Union Address in January “for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice.” This was part of Obama’s crusade for new federal restrictions on firearms ownership. But shouldn’t there have also been chairs left empty to memorialize other casualties — including those ...

Can a Business Overcharge Its Customers?

by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2016

How many times have we heard someone say that he was overcharged for something? The answer to the question of whether a business can overcharge its customers seems, on the surface, to be quite obvious. Yet, it is a question that has more than one answer. At the end of last year, Whole Foods Market, a supermarket chain specializing in ...

A Few Thoughts on Machiavelli

by Joseph R. Stromberg April 1, 2016

The Italian Renaissance politician and writer Nicolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) remains controversial. His defenders see him as a tough-minded “realist” and the founder of proper political science. Some writers find two Machiavellis: an advisor to aspiring despots, or (alternatively) a sincere republican theorist bent on freeing Italy from foreign rule. Either way, Machiavelli’s analysis of such categories as fortune, necessity, ...

Welcome to Base Nation

by Matthew Harwood April 1, 2016

Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 432 pages. There is much in U.S. history that Americans should not be proud of. Chattel slavery. The genocide of indigenous populations. Jim Crow. The U.S. war on terror currently under way and still with no end in sight. But few ...