Freedom Daily Archive

America’s National-Security State

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2023

The following is a nonverbatim transcript of a talk that I delivered on September 1, 2023, at the young scholar’s segment of the annual conference on foreign policy sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute and held at the Dulles Hilton in Virginia. The biggest mistake America has ever made was the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state. ...

Our Potemkin Presidency

by James Bovard November 1, 2023

The Founding Fathers sought to create a government that would be under the law and under the Constitution. Since World War One, presidents have amassed far more arbitrary power to rule by decree. Every recent American commander-in-chief has expanded and exploited the dictatorial potential of the presidency. Yet, because elections continue to be regularly held, most Americans do not ...

Reform, Replace, or Repeal?

by Laurence M. Vance November 1, 2023

The U.S. government is a monstrosity. With its four million employees and annual budget approaching $7 trillion, there is no other way to describe it. The federal government contains a myriad of agencies, bureaus, corporations, offices, commissions, administrations, authorities, and boards, most of which are organized under 15 cabinet-level, executive-branch departments headed by a secretary: for example, Health and Human ...

The Austrian Economists and Classical Liberalism

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 2023

The Austrian School of Economics has been widely identified with classical-liberal and free-market ideas. This is especially the case in the writings of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992). But the free-market, liberal orientation of many members of the Austrian School goes back to its founding in 1871 with the publication of Carl Menger’s (1840–1921) Principles ...

The Story of Sam Bird

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2023

In December 1966, Army Captain Sam Bird’s one-year tour of duty in Vietnam was coming to an end. He was set to be transferred from a combat zone in which he had been operating to a safe zone in the rear and then sent home. However, according to a written account entitled “The Courage of Sam Bird” by B. ...

Congress’s Unconstitutional Pay Raise Scandal

by James Bovard October 1, 2023

“A good politician is almost as rare as an honest burglar,” once quipped H. L. Mencken. After the shenanigans around the latest congressional pay increase, America’s burglars should file a posthumous libel suit against Mencken for that disparaging comparison. There is a pity party in Washington: You weren’t invited, but you’ll pay the bill. The Constitution’s 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992, ...

Why I Will Never Change My Mind about Marijuana

by Laurence M. Vance October 1, 2023

Charles Fain Lehman has changed his mind about marijuana. I haven’t, and never will, change my mind about marijuana. Lehman, a self-described “conservative,” is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal whose work has “appeared in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, National Review, the New York Post, and elsewhere.” He is “a ...

Albert Jay Nock on “Doing the Right Thing” versus Government

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 2023

It is almost 100 years since the libertarian essayist and social critic Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) published his essay “On Doing the Right Thing” in the pages of the American Mercury (November 1924). Nowadays, the very title of the essay may seem strange to many modern American readers. The “right thing?” Surely, the right thing is just “doing your ...

America’s Forever Wars Are Not the Problem

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2023

Ever since it became clear that the U.S. invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were turning into disasters, a common refrain has been to end America’s “forever wars.” Politicians of all political stripes, commentators in the mainstream press, and various conservative and libertarian think tanks and educational foundations have embraced the refrain, thinking that if only America can ...

Macaulay and the Ghosts of Tyranny Past, Part 2

by James Bovard September 1, 2023

Part 1 | Part 2 Reposing with a favorite author in the Virginia Tech library in 1976, I savored one zinger after another in Thomas Macaulay’s History of England. Macaulay hailed the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 as “the most stringent curb that ever legislation imposed on tyranny,” a law that adds to “the security and happiness of every ...

There Is No America First Case for Supporting Ukraine

by Laurence M. Vance September 1, 2023

After the United States foolishly and unnecessarily intervened in World War One — against the warnings of the Founding Fathers about getting involved in European wars — and lost over 116,000 of its young men, American sentiment underwent a shift toward neutrality and nonintervention. With Europe once again embroiled in war beginning in the late 1930s, the America First Committee ...

Thomas Nixon Carver on the Economics of Conflict versus Cooperation

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2023

Human beings have had two fundamental ways of associating with each other: conflict or cooperation. Both methods have run through all recorded human history, as well as long before human beings left intelligible residues of their actions to be deciphered by those who came after them. Group conflicts have seemed to have a variety of causes: religious, political, linguistic, ...