Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

Book Review: The Crisis Ahead

by George Leef March 1, 2013

The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy — How to Save Yourself and Your Country by Peter D. Schiff (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 352 pages. As  I write this review, the presidential campaign of 2012 has recently (and mercifully!) come to its end. Neither major-party candidate ever addressed the most salient issue facing the nation, namely, the fact ...

Time to Nullify the Drug Laws

by Sheldon Richman February 1, 2013

Thomas Jefferson said a revolution every 20 years would be a good thing. Regardless of what one thinks of that, perhaps a little constitutional crisis every now and then would have its benefits. One such crisis may be brewing now. On election day solid majorities of voters in Colorado and Washington voted to make marijuana a legal product not just ...

The Continuing Forfeiture Scourge

by James Bovard February 1, 2013

A federal crime wave is sweeping the nation, and prosecutors and G-men could not be happier about it. The Wall Street Journal reported that government “forfeiture programs confiscated homes, cars, boats, and cash in more than 15,000 cases . The total take topped $2.5 billion, more than doubling in five years, Justice Department statistics show.” Beginning in 1970, Congress ...

Taxi Tyranny

by Laurence M. Vance February 1, 2013

One of the most prevalent and persistent myths about the American economy is that it is based on the free market, or laissez-faire capitalism. True, when compared with much of the rest of the world, the United States appears to have a relatively free economy. The truth, however, is that in some sectors of the American economy, government intervention ...