Freedom Daily Archive

Securing the Blessings of Liberty

by David S. D'Amato February 1, 2016

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty by Timothy Sandefur (Cato Institute, 2014), 200 pages. In his book The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty, Timothy Sandefur, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and a Cato Institute adjunct scholar, argues that “the primacy ...

Gun Control and the Right to Resist Tyranny

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2016

If Jews in Nazi Germany had been free to own guns, would that have diminished the impact of the Holocaust? GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson candidate set off a political firestorm by proclaiming that it would have. Gun-rights critics went on the attack, saying that the right to bear arms would have had no effect on the number of Jews ...

Supreme Fashion Reject

by James Bovard January 1, 2016

“You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth,” the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen declared in his famous play An Enemy of the People.  Unfortunately, the justices on the Supreme Court of the United States — the sacred burial ground of Americans’ rights and liberties — are not members of Ibsen’s ...

The Libertarian Solution

by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2016

The United States of America is facing some major issues in the twenty-first century. The national debt is $18.5 trillion. The budget deficit is $500 billion. Homelessness is widespread in most major cities. Student-loan debt is more than a trillion dollars. Social Security and Medicare are insolvent. Government spending continues to skyrocket. There are more than 45 million Americans ...

Closed-Border Libertarians: It’s Time to End the War on Immigration

by Will Tippens January 1, 2016

Warrantless searches and seizures on a massive scale, bureaucratic logjams, arbitrary edicts that squelch freedom of association, unchecked waste and corruption — it is difficult to reconcile any of these symptoms of big government with liberty. And yet, many who strongly value freedom still support all of them in the name of border control. For these “closed-border libertarians”, the argument ...

Welcome Back to Freedom

by Matthew Harwood January 1, 2016

The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2015), 320 pages. Do you really want someone to die? If you could help bring about someone’s demise by anonymously and securely placing a bet on when that particular someone might take a dirtnap, would you? That’s the premise of the Assassination Market, an ...

The Tyranny of Eminent Domain

by David S. D'Amato January 1, 2016

The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain by Ilya Somin (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 336 pages. The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London has become infamous, singled out by defenders of liberty and property for special opprobrium. The Court’s opinion was a sobering reminder ...

The Inanity of the Cold War

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2015

There were many inanities that came with the Cold War, the 45-year period of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. In fact, one might easily argue that the entire Cold War was an exercise in inanity. U.S. officials, of course, have always maintained that the Cold War was necessary to prevent the Soviet Union from imposing communism ...

The Cover-Up of the Damning 9/11 Report Continues

by James Bovard December 1, 2015

Do Americans have the right to learn whether a foreign government helped finance the 9/11 attacks? A growing number of congressmen and senators are demanding that a 28-page portion of a 2002 congressional report finally be declassified. The Obama administration appears to be resisting, and the stakes are huge. What is contained in those pages could radically change Americans’ ...

Unions and Strikes in a Free Society

by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2015

The labor-union membership rate of American workers has been declining for years. Labor-union strikes have concomitantly decreased as well. Unions have historically been associated with violence, corruption, anti-capitalistic propaganda, Democratic politics — and strikes. Unions According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014, union membership fell to 11.1 percent, down 0.2 percent from 2013, although the number of workers belonging ...

War of Pure Defense: A First Sketch

by Joseph R. Stromberg December 1, 2015

Few thinkers have ever set forth (much less developed) the rather straightforward idea of purely defensive war, i.e., war limited to repelling invaders — and otherwise doing nothing at all. The term “defensivism” would suit the case, but since philosopher Eric Mack put it (in my view) to different and rather conventional use almost forty years ago (“Permissible Defense,” ...

The Forgotten Meaning of “Sound Money” (and Why It’s Coming Back)

by Guy Christopher December 1, 2015

We Americans no longer carry gold and silver money in our pockets and purses as our grandparents did during their lives. But we still carry the history, legacy, and spirit of those gold and silver coins in our language — with more meaning than you might imagine. “Sound money” has a clear message recognized for centuries around the world. It ...