Freedom Daily Archive

Class Theory, Part 1: Modern Conservative Class Analysis

by Anthony Gregory May 1, 2014

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Since the 2008 financial collapse, class rhetoric has arisen on both prevalent sides of the U.S. political spectrum. The grassroots “base” in both the Republican and Democratic party has become animated by a new or invigorated perception of class struggle. The politicians in each party have echoed these ...

A Treacherous Undertow

by David S. D'Amato May 1, 2014

American Coup: How a Terrified Government Is Destroying the Constitution by William M. Arkin (Little, Brown and Company 2013), 368 pages. Among the philosophy of liberty’s core ideas is the well-known precept that a free society must be one of laws and not of men, that the rule of law should stand above the arbitrary caprice of some empowered ...

Broken

by Matthew Harwood May 1, 2014

They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars — The Untold Story by Ann Jones. (Haymarket Books/Dispatch Books 2013), 191 pages. Members of the American armed forces are props. They wave from convertibles as Independence Day parades make their way down Main Street U.S.A. They are trotted out at football games to bless the proceedings as some ...

Let’s Raise Our Vision

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2014

There was once a time when religious liberty had never before been considered. Throughout history, people lived under political systems in which government and religion were combined. Since it was the system under which they had been born and raised and which existed all over the world, people just didn’t give any thought to an alternative. Then one day, ...

Crime and Punishment in a Free Society

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2014

Would a free society be a crime-free society? We have good reason to anticipate it. Don’t accuse me of utopianism. I don’t foresee a future of new human beings who consistently respect the rights of others. Alas, there will always be those who would invade the boundaries of their fellow human beings. Rather, I want to draw attention to the ...

Foreign Aid Clobbers the Third World

by James Bovard April 1, 2014

The U.S. government loves to preen about its generosity to the world’s downtrodden. However, a long series of presidents and their tools have scorned the evidence that their aid programs perennially clobber recipients. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sordid history of U.S. food aid. Food for Peace was devised in 1954 to help dump abroad embarrassingly huge crop ...

Tolerance: Joining the Best of Conservatism and Progressivism

by Alexander William Salter April 1, 2014

Many liberals (in the classical sense) are so reluctant to concede an inch to conservatism and progressivism that they insist the latter two political philosophies, and the worldviews that frequently accompany them, have no redeeming features. This is a mistake. There are elements of conservatism worth conserving, and elements of progressivism worth progressing towards. Furthermore, tolerance, the premier social ...

“Racist” Zip Codes

by Wendy McElroy April 1, 2014

A new type of social engineering is poised to descend on American communities: diversity mapping and the rectification of any racial inequities the mapping reveals. The campaign is meant to stamp out “geospatial discrimination.” The term refers to the fact that affluent neighborhoods tend to be dominated by whites and Asians. What government calls “protected minorities,” especially blacks, are relatively ...

The Death of Empires

by Martin Morse Wooster April 1, 2014

Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America by Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane. (Simon and Schuster 2013), 296 pages. One of the perennial questions historians address is why empires fell. In his 1987 bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Yale historian Paul Kennedy theorized that every empire reaches a tipping point ...

For Your Own Good

by John Ahrens April 1, 2014

Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism by Sarah Conly (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 256 pages (ebook edition reviewed). Bowdoin philosophy professor Sarah Conly has given us a remarkably timely book. Against Autonomy makes an important contribution to the trending discussion of what some call the “nanny state” and others might call simply “petty fascism” (or maybe just “fascism”). It is ...

Wage War on Poverty with Libertarianism

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2014

Almost 50 years ago Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.” Ever since then, the federal government, through a wide array of welfare-state programs and regulatory programs, has waged its war, aiming to end poverty or at least to greatly alleviate it. After a half-century of poverty warfare, has the war been won? Not according to Democrats. They say that ...

The Pope Dabbles in Economics

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2014

Pope Francis wrote in his recent apostolic exhortation, “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality.” He’s right — but not in the way he intends. Before I elaborate, let’s look ...