Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

Innovation, Patents, and the Industrial Revolution

by David K. Levine June 1, 2015

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: The Story of Steam, Industry and Invention by William Rosen (University of Chicago Press 2012), 376 pages. This is the story of an important microcosm of the Industrial Revolution: the development of the railroad. Although the story is one of personalities — and the book is engaging and a good read ...

Militarism: Our Civic Religion

by Michael Swanson June 1, 2015

Militarism, U.S.A by Col. James Donovan; Foreword by Gen. David Shoup (Scribner’s 1970), 265 pages Today the United States is engaged in seemingly winless wars without end in Iraq and Afghanistan and has been engaging in interventions in places such as Libya, which seem to result in nothing but chaos. Libya has descended into civil war and the rise ...

Empire, Security, and the War State

by David S. D'Amato June 1, 2015

The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945–1963 by Michael Swanson (CreateSpace 2013), 430 pages. In the October 1958 issue of The New Yorker, near the high-water mark of McCarthyism, the novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy famously wrote, “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.” ...

Why We Don’t Compromise, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2  | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Ever since our inception in 1989, The Future of Freedom Foundation has had a firm policy against compromising libertarian principles. The reason is: We want to live in a free society, and we believe that principles hold the ...

The Poison Called Nationalism

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2015

  Forward, the Light Brigade! Was there a man dismay’d? Not tho’ the soldier knew Someone had blunder’d: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” The reason for the venom directed at those of us who question American sniper Chris Kyle’s status ...

Eric Holder’s Leviathan-Loving Legacy

by James Bovard May 1, 2015

Last summer, Attorney General Eric Holder solemnly declared, “The name ought to be changed. It’s an offensive name.” Holder observed that despite the organization’s “storied history,” it could “increase their fan base” by changing their name — “if they did something that from my perspective that is so obviously right.” Unfortunately, Holder was referring to the name of the Washington ...

America as the Neo-British Empire

by Joseph R. Stromberg May 1, 2015

Foreign-policy realists and relative noninterventionists, among others, want to commit Americans to offshore balancing, an idea drawn from various English political-economic sources. After the Glorious Revolution (1688) securing the Protestant succession, influential English statesmen sought to make European balance-keeping central to their foreign strategy. Another view, deducible from 19th-century British practice (and formally called Hegemonic Stability Theory), wants the ...

Government versus Progress

by George Leef May 1, 2015

Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good by Tom W. Bell (Mercatus Center 2014), 238 pages. Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom by Adam Thierer (Mercatus Center 2014), 1089 pages. These books cover two different aspects of the same phenomenon — how laws and regulations obstruct progress. Tom Bell’s Intellectual Privilege examines copyright law, which ...

How Technology Can Create Political Change

by Kevin Carson May 1, 2015

Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker (Liberty.me 2015), Kindle, 130 pages (estimated). Jeffrey Tucker opens with the story of Fereshteh Forough, who set up a chain of clinics in Afghanistan to empower women by teaching them coding, design, and other computer skills that they could market directly on the web. The problem they ...

Iraq and American Sniper

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2015

Last January the movie American Sniper was breaking box-office records and generating a national debate over the nature of war and how the movie depicts war. The movie revolved around Chris Kyle, a real-life U.S. soldier who had four tours in Iraq as a sniper and, in the process, set a record for the number of people killed by ...

Monopoly and Aggression

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2015

The concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related, like lock and key, or mother and child. You cannot fully understand the first without understanding the second. Most of us are taught to think of a monopoly as simply any lone seller of a good or service, but that definition is fraught with problems, as Murray Rothbard, Austrian economists generally, and ...