Freedom Daily Archive

The Natural Right to Be Free

by Laurence M. Vance March 1, 2012

It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom by Andrew P. Napolitano (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011); 240 pages. Three recent books on libertarianism — Jeffrey A. Miron’s Libertarianism, from A to Z (Basic Books, 2010); Jacob H. Huebert’s Libertarianism Today (Praeger, 2010); and Tom G. Palmer’s Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, ...

The Greatest Threat to Our Freedom, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 27, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Suppose a nation’s constitution prohibits the ruler of the country from infringing fundamental, God-given rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, privacy, economic liberty, and gun rights. Suppose also that the constitution provides a myriad of procedural obstacles and obstructions before the government can ...

War with Iran Would Be Madness

by Sheldon Richman February 10, 2012

Barack Obama’s refusal to rule out military action against Iran, and several Republican presidential candidates’ pledge to launch a war if elected, should appall anyone who believes, with the free-market liberal Ludwig von Mises, that “not war, but peace, is the father of all things.” If the U.S. government or Israel were to attack Iran, all hell would break loose. ...

TSA — Tenth Anniversary of a National Nightmare

by James Bovard February 8, 2012

Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush promised Americans, “We will not surrender our freedom to travel.” In hindsight, he may have been referring to himself and other high-ranking government officials. Because for all other Americans, airline travel has become more arduous and more perilous in the past ten years. The Bush administration and Congress responded ...

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State Part 10

by Gregory Bresiger February 5, 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 Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the ...

With Freedom and Justice for Some, Part 1

by Glenn Greenwald February 2, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 As a litigator who practiced for more than a decade in federal and state courts across the country, I’ve long been aware of the inequities that pervade the American justice system. The rich enjoy superior legal representation and therefore much better prospects for success in court than the poor. The powerful ...

Fear, Inc.

by Matthew Harwood February 1, 2012

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest and William Arkin (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011); 320 pages. All Americans are equal, but some are more equal than others. Since the attacks of September 11, a new, powerful class of people has swarmed into the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs. Armed ...

The Greatest Threat to Our Freedom, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 29, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Of all the dangers to the freedom of the American people, I would rank the enemy-combatant doctrine as the greatest. In my opinion, the federal government’s power to label a person a terrorist as part of its so-called war on terrorism — a power that came into ...

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 ...