Freedom Daily Archive

Chile’s Gun-Control Lesson for Americans

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2013

One of the popular arguments for gun control is that people don’t need assault rifles, high-capacity magazines, and certain types of high-powered pistols to shoot deer. That argument, however, ignores the primary rationale for the Second Amendment, which was to ensure that people retained the means to resist tyranny at the hands of the federal government. Statists give short shrift ...

James Buchanan’s Subjectivist Economics

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2013

James Buchanan, the Nobel laureate who died at 93 in January, was well known for his pioneering work in Public Choice (the application of economic principles to politics), constitutional economics (as a device for limiting government power), and many other key subjects in political economy. His voluminous work has long been of interest to libertarians and classical liberals for ...

Obama and His “Most Evident” Right: Equality

by James Bovard April 1, 2013

In his second inaugural address, Barack Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and hailed “the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal.” Obama never explained why “created equal” was more evident than the right to liberty. He understands that he can capture far more power by invoking equality than he could by promising to ...

Why James Buchanan Matters for Those Who Love Freedom

by Steven Horwitz April 1, 2013

On January 9 the world of political economy and the community of libertarian academics lost one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers with the death of James Buchanan at age 93. Although he was not as well known as Mises and Hayek, or even Milton Friedman or perhaps Robert Nozick, his work belongs with theirs in any discussion ...

Ten Reasons the U.S. Is No Longer the Land of the Free

by Jonathan Turley April 1, 2013

While each new national-security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such ...

Macroeconomics as Coordination

by Alexander William Salter April 1, 2013

If your main source of economic information is a newspaper, television news station, or government statistical bureau, you would probably say that macroeconomics is the discipline that studies a handful of aggregate data series, such as consumption, investment, government spending, and total income, for the purpose of understanding the causal relationships among them. The reason people pay attention to ...

Book Review: All in the Family: America’s Big Brother

by Matthew Harwood April 1, 2013

Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner (New York: Random House, 2012), 560 pages. Since its humble beginnings in 1908 with a pint-sized force of 34 special agents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has always been the pillow over the face of the First Amendment. From its inception, the FBI was first and foremost an intelligence agency ...

Right-to-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2013

It’s not widely known, but an earlier generation of libertarians condemned so-called right-to-work laws as anti-market. For example, Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, compared right-to-work to anti-discrimination laws. Ayn Rand also opposed right-to-work laws. The Spring 1966 issue of the libertarian student-run journal New Individualist Review carried Prof. Hirschel Kasper’s article “What’s Wrong with Right-to-Work Laws.” NIR was ...

Police Tyranny, Slightly Curbed

by James Bovard March 1, 2013

On the night of March 3, 2010, University of Maryland students spilled out onto a main street in College Park, Maryland, to celebrate a victory by the school’s basketball team. Prince George’s County police had been primed for the event and waited nearby, dressed in riot gear and ready for action. John McKenna, a 21-year-old student, skipped up toward a ...

The Democratic Way of Killing: The President as Judge, Jury, and Executioner

by Doug Bandow March 1, 2013

One wonders whether Americans felt pride when they discovered that, according to the New York Times, their president was “a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” As a result, Barack Oba-ma believes that “he should take moral responsibility” for U.S. policy, including killing anyone and everyone seen as a terrorist threat to the United States. ...

Gun Control Is Violence

by Anthony Gregory March 1, 2013

Mohandas Gandhi, the greatest pacifist of the 20th century, is widely quoted as having said, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look back upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest.” Some have struggled to reconcile his pacifism with an opposition to disarmament. But there really is nothing to reconcile ...

Foreign Aid: The Seen and the Unseen

by Michael Tennant March 1, 2013

Practically everyone in American politics today claims to favor cutting the federal deficit in part by reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse.” At the same time, however, every item in the budget lines someone’s pockets, and that someone can always be counted on to argue — either directly or, more often, through a seemingly disinterested surrogate — that his plainly ...