Freedom Daily Archive

The Business Cycle Explained

by George Leef November 1, 2013

It Didn’t Have to Be This Way: Why Boom and Bust Is Unnecessary — and How the Austrian School of Economics Breaks the Cycle by Harry C. Veryser (Intercollegiate Studies Institute 2012), 318 pages. This is one instance where a book’s subtitle tells the reader much more about its content than the title does. You know at once that ...

Egypt’s Lessons for Americans, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 The military coup in Egypt last summer holds some valuable lessons for Americans, especially with respect to such things as freedom, democracy, and the U.S. national-security state, which has been an important part of American life since the end of World War II. The coup provides an especially important lesson with respect ...

Is Edward Snowden a Lawbreaker?

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 2013

Most people believe that Edward Snowden, who has confirmed that the U.S. government spies on us, broke the law. Even many of his defenders concede this. While in one sense the statement “Snowden broke the law” may be trivially true, in another, deeper sense it is untrue. He may have violated the terms of legislation passed by Congress and signed ...

Voting Rights as Bogus Panaceas

by James Bovard October 1, 2013

The Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last June. “Liberals” were horrified and reacted as if the Civil War had been fought in vain. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg denounced the decision for its “hubris,” Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) condemned it as a “dagger” stab at civil rights, and Attorney General Eric Holder ...

Gabriel Kolko Revisited, Part 2: Kolko Abroad

by Joseph R. Stromberg October 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 Gabriel Kolko’s historical writing hinges on the interrelations of economic, political, and ideological power in American history. His later work increasingly focused on those phenomena in relation to war, peace, and empire. As his project went forward, Kolko increasingly departed from that Marxist framework in which state power becomes so utterly subordinate ...

Digging Out

by Richard W. Fulmer October 1, 2013

Pundits are full of advice about how and how not to pull the country out of its financial morass. Rebuild infrastructure or cut spending, increase deficit spending or reduce the debt, raise or lower taxes, regulate or deregulate, implement a new industrial policy or get government out of the economy, open the monetary floodgates or end the Fed’s easy-money ...

Revisiting Vietnam

by Laurence M. Vance October 1, 2013

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse (Metropolitan Books, 2013), 386 pages. The Vietnam War polarized Americans in the 20th century like no other event, dividing the people as no war had since the so-called Civil War a century earlier. Even though Vietnam was thousands of miles away, had not attacked the United ...

The Welfare State Exposed

by George Leef October 1, 2013

After the Welfare State, edited by Tom G. Palmer (Jameson Books, 2012), 180 pages Most Americans (indeed, most people in every advanced nation) walk around in a fog of myths and misconceptions concerning the subject of this book — the welfare state. They believe that in the absence of governmental welfare programs, there would be little or no support ...

How I Came to Reject the Welfare State, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2013

Part 1| Part 2 During the part of my life that I was a welfare statist, I never gave any thought to how the government raised its money. I just assumed that the government operated like a business — that it earned its money and then figured out ways to spend it. Thus I could ...

It’s Not Edward Snowden Who Betrayed Us

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2013

When you cut through the fog, the NSA controversy is about whether we should trust people with institutional power. Edward Snowden’s courageous exposure of massive secret surveillance separates those who say yes from those who say, “Hell no!” The trusting attitude can be found among progressives and conservatives alike (with notable exceptions), and even some who have identified themselves as ...

The Sordid History of IRS Political Abuse

by James Bovard September 1, 2013

The power to tax has long conferred the power to destroy one’s political opponents. When the latest IRS politicization scandal erupted in May, many commentators talked as if the abuses were a novelty in American history. But, as David Burnham noted in his masterful 1990 book, A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power, “In almost ...

U.S. Government to Blame for Somalia’s Misery

by Scott Horton September 1, 2013

At the beginning of May the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), a U.S.- and U.K.-government-financed organization that monitors various food crises around the world, released a new report detailing the horrific consequences of the Somali famine of 2011. According to FEWS NET, “An estimated 4.6 percent of the total population and 10 percent of children under 5 died ...