Freedom Daily Archive

Freedom versus Medals of Freedom

by James Bovard March 1, 2014

Though proximity to power is its own reward, rulers have long recognized the benefit of distributing trinkets to potential sycophants. From medieval times onwards, the English king was seen as the “fount of all honors.” The British government created endless ribbons, orders, and titles to attach individuals to the crown. Cash was sometimes necessary to clinch the allegiance. Samuel ...

The EU Threat to Liberty

by Philip Vander Elst March 1, 2014

“Each year the takes and spends more of our money without EU auditors being able to reliably confirm where much of this money has actually gone. The number of EU bureaucrats rises ever upwards. Ever more bureaucrats seem inevitably to lead to ever more rules and regulations, allowing the EU to expand its influence to almost every ...

Money and the Constitution

by George Leef March 1, 2014

Constitutional Money: A Review of the Supreme Court’s Monetary Decisions by Richard H. Timberlake (Cambridge University Press and Cato Institute 2013), 257 pages. Most Americans would be surprised to learn that the Federal Reserve Notes in their wallets and the balances in their various accounts are not constitutional money. Yes, what they have is money, but not the kind ...

Lincoln-Worship Overlays the Corporatist Agenda

by Kevin Carson March 1, 2014

Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again by Rich Lowry (HarperCollins 2013), 390 pages. One of the central themes in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is the ideology he calls “authoritarian high modernism”: It is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound) version of ...

What Does It Mean to Be Free?

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2014

Johann von Goethe once wrote, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Goethe’s statement perfectly captures the plight of the American people in our time. That’s one of the principal challenges that we libertarians face, for if people are convinced they’re free, they have no incentive to break free of their servitude. Even ...

One Moral Standard for All

by Sheldon Richman February 1, 2014

Libertarians make a self-defeating mistake in assuming that their fundamental principles differ radically from most other people’s principles. Think how much easier it would be to bring others to the libertarian position if we realized that they already agree with us in substantial ways. What am I talking about? It’s quite simple. Libertarians believe that the initiation of force is ...

How I Learned Not to Shovel

by James Bovard February 1, 2014

The Obama administration has touted government jobs and training programs as one of the solutions to America’s high unemployment rate. Such programs can teach young people invaluable lessons — especially about the unreliability of political promises to provide kids with valuable skills. I learned a lot about the nature of government work during the summer I spent on the ...

Corporatism as Theory and Practice

by Joseph R. Stromberg February 1, 2014

When I first discovered corporatism, about 1966, it was not exactly a household word. The term was known only to specialists, who mostly looked for it in the recent (pre–1945) past. Between about 1960 and the early 1970s, a few New Left and libertarian scholars stirred up greater (but still quite small) interest in this arcane term. My original ...

How the Castle Crumbled

by Matthew Harwood February 1, 2014

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko (Public Affairs 2013), 400 pages. “A man’s home is his castle,” the old English saying goes. Since the American Revolution, Americans’ homes have been considered sanctified space. Under the Castle Doctrine, first expressed in English common law, a person’s home — whether it’s a shack or ...

Two Brothers in Search of Monsters to Destroy

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2014

In celebration of the Fourth of July, 1821, John Quincy Adams delivered a speech before Congress that is famously titled, “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.” Adams used the occasion to describe the foreign policy of the United States: Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her ...

Lysander Spooner on the National Debt

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2014

Once again, last autumn we were inundated with dire warnings about what would befall the American people and the world economy if Congress did not raise the debt ceiling — or, as I call it, the debt sky, because apparently the sky’s the limit. As he has each time this issue has come up, Barack Obama emphasized that increasing the ...

Common Sense versus Obama’s Next War

by James Bovard January 1, 2014

The Obama administration tottered on the edge of launching a cruise missile attack on Syria this past August and September. Obama hesitated and decided to seek congressional approval before blowing up many targets on the Syrian landscape. After Americans made it loud and clear that they did not want another war, congressional opposition helped curb his bellicosity. But he ...