Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

The Battle for the Supreme Court

by George Leef April 1, 2016

Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court by Damon Root (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 274 pages. Every case that comes before the U.S. Supreme Court has its unique factual setting and contentious legal issues, but in a large percentage of them, the decision ultimately comes down to this: Should the Court defer to the legislative ...

Why I Favor Limited Government, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5| Part 6 Ever since I became a libertarian in the late 1970s, there has been an ongoing debate within the libertarian movement between libertarians who advocate limited government and those who advocate anarchy, meaning a society based on the absence ...

Presidential Fear-Mongering versus Freedom

by James Bovard March 1, 2016

After the San Bernardino massacre late last year, Barrack Obama made a rare speech from the Oval Office. His most memorable line was his declaration that “freedom is more powerful than fear.” That epigram might have made John F. Kennedy’s speechwriters beam. But it is ludicrous to hear such a comment from a president who has spent almost seven ...

The Libertarian Sticking Point

by Laurence M. Vance March 1, 2016

Why aren’t more Americans libertarians? Why aren’t more liberals becoming libertarians? They generally share the libertarian commitment to freedom of speech, civil liberties, personal freedom, privacy, and the Fourth Amendment, or at least they claim to do so. Why aren’t more conservatives becoming libertarians? They generally share the libertarian commitment to the free market, limited government, free trade, property ...