Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

Cops and Donuts Don’t Mix

by James Bovard April 1, 2015

On a Sunday morning early last summer, I was driving south across the Potomac River to a hike in Fairfax County, Virginia. The previous night the hike leader posted online a map of the jaunt. It looked like a typical suburban stroll until I saw a Dunkin’ Donuts marked near the start point. As the Food and Drug Administration ...

Realism versus Nonintervention

by Joseph R. Stromberg April 1, 2015

Foreign-policy realists have been around for time out of memory, but the unbearable follies of post–9/11 U.S. foreign policy have dramatically increased their prestige. A current short list of realists would include Andrew Bacevich, Steven Walt, Ivan Eland, and Ted Galen Carpenter (perhaps also Daniel Larison of American Conservative). These realists seem like sanity itself compared to our entrenched, ...

Rule by Illusion

by David S. D'Amato April 1, 2015

National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon (Oxford University Press 2014), 272 pages. Americans have been taken in by an illusion, complacently believing that they live in a constitutional republic in which the rule of law is paramount and public officials are answerable to the electorate. In reality, however, an ascendant technocratic class of experts governs ...

Global Thug State

by Matthew Harwood April 1, 2015

Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World by Tom Engelhardt (Haymarket Books 2014), 200 pages. “A shadow government has conquered twenty-first-century Washington. We have the makings of a thug state of the first order.” No two sentences more clearly and disturbingly summarize what Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a ...