Freedom Daily Archive

Economic Fallacies

by Sheldon Richman January 29, 2012

In On Liberty John Stuart Mill wrote, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” This is an especially important principle for libertarians. We rely on persuasion to win adherents to the freedom philosophy. To persuade, one must use effective techniques of rhetoric. Just as important, one must know what one is arguing ...

The Long History of Entrapment Insanity

by James Bovard January 26, 2012

America has seen a profusion of entrapment schemes in recent years. Many of the most high-profile domestic-terrorism cases have been ginned up by FBI agents who preyed on persons who had little competence for creating perils on their own. The explosion in entrapment operations is partly the result of a profound shift in the type of abuses that courts ...

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 9

by Gregory Bresiger January 23, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 In 1949, Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson convinced Congress that the ...

The Permanent Injustice of Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington January 12, 2012

When the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, opened on January 11, 2002, as part of the Bush administration’s global “war on terror,” in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was not immediately apparent that it was a dangerous aberration from recognized laws and treaties that would tarnish America’s name for years to come. There had been ...

What Are You Afraid Of if You Have Nothing to Hide?

by Matthew Harwood January 1, 2012

The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades our Liberties by David K. shipler (New York: Knopf 2011), 384 pages. Late this past spring, two U.S. senators finally had the courage to look Big Brother in its inhuman, electronic eye and try to come clean on the USA PATRIOT Act. According to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Org.) ...

Economic Liberty and Its Abandonment, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 31, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 While the movement towards socialism and interventionism in America had been slowly gathering steam in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was during the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s that the statist revolution was won in the United States. It was Roosevelt, more than anyone else, who brought an end to one ...

Government Can’t Stimulate an Economy

by Sheldon Richman December 29, 2011

Barack Obama won’t use the “stimulus” label to describe the nearly half-trillion-dollar jobs bill he sent to Congress in September, but that refusal can’t hide the fact that he has no idea how economies recover from recessions. “Stimulus” is a tainted label because his $800 billion bill in 2009 was a failure. Somehow a package about half that size ...

Federal Training Flops

by James Bovard December 28, 2011

Barack Obama recently proposed new programs to provide job training for youth and the long-term unemployed. For half a century, federal programs have provided trainees with little more than false hope. There is no reason to permit the feds to inflict new damage after all their previous failures. Between 1962 and 1980, the feds spent more for federal job training ...

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 8

by Gregory Bresiger December 27, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 George Kennan, the author of the containment doctrine, the doctrine that had set the ...

Noninterventionism: Cornerstone of a Free Society

by Anthony Gregory December 21, 2011

A free society is impossible under an empire. Even the most just war you can imagine is a disaster for liberty and prosperity, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out. An unjust war amounts to murder, mayhem, and mass destruction. And a perpetual state of war guarantees that liberty will never be achieved. James Madison said it very well: Of all ...

Who Was the Real Thomas Jefferson?

by Thomas E. Woods Jr. December 20, 2011

Liberty, State, & Union: The Political Theory of Thomas Jefferson by Luigi Marco Bassani (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2010); 277 pages. No one doubts that our understanding of historical figures may need to be revisited from time to time. But academic specialists have been known to overreach. To portray a historical figure in a light exactly opposed to the ...

Economic Liberty and Its Abandonment, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 30, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 With federal spending continuing to soar out of control, the obvious question arises: How do we get our nation back on the right track — toward economic prosperity and economic liberty? To answer that question, it’s helpful to examine basic principles, including the founding principles of our nation and how our country turned away ...