Freedom Daily Archive

The War That Justified Other Wars

by Laurence M. Vance August 1, 2015

The Good War That Wasn’t — And Why It Matters: World War II’s Moral Legacy by Ted Grimsrud (Cascade Books, 2014), 286 pages. Even among some libertarians, World War II is viewed as the great exception. Although it was the most destructive thing to life, liberty, and property that the world has ever seen, World War II is ...

Why We Don’t Compromise, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Suppose 100 percent of libertarians called for a reform, rather than a dismantling, of the welfare-warfare state way of life under which Americans today live. What would be the chances of achieving the free ...

The Mandatory Voting Panacea

by James Bovard July 1, 2015

Barack Obama suggested on March 18, 2015, that mandatory voting could cure some of the ills of American democracy. He said that compelling everyone to vote would “encourage more participation” — perhaps the same way that the specter of prison sentences encourages more people to pay taxes. While there are many good reasons to oppose mandatory voting, compulsory balloting ...

Build It and They Will Come

by Laurence M. Vance July 1, 2015

The city of Los Angeles is the country’s second-largest media market. Yet, the city has not had an NFL football team to call its own since the 1994 season, when the Rams and the Raiders each played their last games there. After beginning in Cleveland, the Rams called Los Angeles home from 1946 to 1994 before moving to St. ...

When the Supreme Court Stopped Economic Fascism in America

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2015

There was a time when the Supreme Court of the United States defended and upheld the constitutional protections for economic liberty in America. This year marks the 80th anniversary of one of the Supreme Court’s finest hours, when it overturned Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda for economic fascism in the United States. The trend towards bigger and ever-more-intrusive government, unfortunately, was not ...

The Inherent Criminality of Air Power

by Joseph R. Stromberg July 1, 2015

Constant American bombing of much of the world ought to raise questions about the morality (if any) of air power, even if few Americans bother to confront them. (Indeed, many moral theorists would rather apply their theorizing and “intuitions” to runaway trolley cars than to the real-world problem posed here.) Air power first showed its long-imagined potential in World War ...

The Case for Economic Freedom

by Benjamin A. Rogge July 1, 2015

I shall identify my brand of economics as that of economic freedom, and I shall define economic freedom as that set of economic arrangements that would exist in a society in which the government’s only function would be to prevent one man from using force or fraud against another — including within this, of course, the task of national ...

Prohibition’s Killing Fields

by Matthew Harwood July 1, 2015

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 400 pages. When American bombs began to rain down on Vietnam, the country’s water buffalo reacted queerly. The fields full of opium had always been there, but once the U.S. munitions fell around them, the water buffalo left their pastures ...

Why We Don’t Compromise, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2  | Part 3 | Part 4 |  Part 5 | Part 6 In fighting for the free society, people necessarily must determine what it means to be free. Freedom obviously has many different dimensions. Religious liberty entails the freedom to worship God or not, without state compulsion one way ...

The Supreme Court’s Dreadful Record on Freedom

by James Bovard June 1, 2015

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the legality of the Affordable Care Act this past March. Several justices questioned whether a ruling against Obamacare would be “unconstitutionally coercive” to state governments that did not create health-care exchanges. The Supreme Court is sometimes hypersensitive about the authority of state governments when federalism issues are raised. But at the same ...

The Simplicity of Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2015

Libertarianism has been defined as an ethical system that seeks to preserve the liberty of individuals and as a political philosophy concerned with the permissible use of force or violence. These are two sides of the same coin. As libertarianism’s greatest theorist, Murray Rothbard, explained, Libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it ...

Penalty of Surrender

by Leonard Read June 1, 2015

A certain business leader, perhaps among the most publicized during the last two decades, once severely lectured me on my unswerving and uncompromising behavior. He charged that I saw things only in blacks and whites. He argued that practical life was lived in shades of grays, actually in the shadows of these two extremes. He suggested that I had ...