Freedom Daily Archive

The Best Introduction to Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2011

Libertarianism Today by Jacob H. Huebert (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 254 pages. Major books on libertarianism seem to come in pairs. First, in 1973, there was Murray N. Rothbard’s For a New Liberty (Macmillan, with a revised edition in 1978) and John Hospers’s Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (Nash Publishing). The year 1997 saw the publication of David ...

Deference to Authority, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 30, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Many years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Cuba, a country that holds valuable lessons in freedom for the American people, albeit not in ways that one might imagine. As a prerequisite to traveling to Cuba, the U.S. government requires Americans to secure a license from the U.S. Treasury Department. ...

Afghanistan: A War of Choice, Not Necessity

by Sheldon Richman March 25, 2011

In December Barack Obama received his awaited assessment of the war in Afghanistan, then reported to the American people that the mission is “on track” and troops would begin to withdraw next July. But the semi-upbeat assessment was less than persuasive because, as the Washington Post reported, “The overview of the long-awaited report contained no specifics or data to ...

Bush, Torture, and the Rule of Law

by James Bovard March 22, 2011

Last November, George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, hit the streets. And Americans could see firsthand the former president bragging about ordering torture. Bush wrote that when he was requested to approve the CIA’s waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he responded, “Damn right.” Six months before his memoir was released, in a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he told ...

Auberon Herbert, Part 2

by Wendy McElroy March 20, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 On other issues, Auberon Herbert predictably sided with working people. In 1869, he acted as one of the presidents of the first national Cooperative Congress. As its name suggests, the Cooperative movement focused on establishing cooperative societies and arrangements, such as mutual insurance agencies. When Herbert’s Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State first ...

The Story Behind the Permanent War

by Anthony Gregory March 18, 2011

Washington Rules: Americas Path to Permanent War by Andrew J. Bacevich (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 286 pages. During the last decade, left-liberals accused the controversial Bush administration of a wickedness, arrogance, and incompetence that supposedly set that presidency apart from others in American history. Bush was an especially bad warmonger who broke with the traditional and venerable principles that had ...

Deference to Authority, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 27, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Addressing the WikiLeaks controversy, noted New York Times columnist David Brooks opened up his November 29, 2010, column with the following observation: mother didn’t enroll him in the local schools because, as Raffi Khatchadourian wrote in a New Yorker profile, she feared “that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy ...

Afghanistan: Digging In

by Sheldon Richman February 25, 2011

President Obama once said withdrawal from Afghanistan would begin in July 2011 — maybe, conditions permitting. But he has since backed away from that date. Now NATO, echoing American officials, says security won’t be fully turned over to the Afghan government any earlier than the end of 2014 — again, maybe; the alliance has signed a long-term security agreement ...

Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Fraud

by James Bovard February 22, 2011

President Obama has succeeded in seizing new power over health care and other swaths of American lives in part because previous presidents muddied Americans’ understanding of freedom. Most of the past century’s debates over the meaning of liberty have featured one politician after another who promised people true freedom, if only they would submit to increased government power. In the ...

Making War at Home

by Catherine Lutz February 20, 2011

I could see its seams as the huge warplane slowly lumbered overhead toward its twilight landing at a military complex near Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was mere feet above the flapping laundry and unlandscaped grounds of a trailer park. A few miles further away, people living in the houses of another, greener area of Fayetteville straightened wall hangings set ...

Auberon Herbert, Part 1

by Wendy McElroy February 18, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 In his periodical Liberty, (May 23, 1885), the quintessential American individualist-anarchist Benjamin Tucker wrote of his British counterpart Auberon Herbert, “I know of no more inspiring spectacle in England than that of this man of exceptionally high social position doing battle almost single-handed with the giant monster, government, and showing in it a mental ...

A Dictionary of Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance February 15, 2011

Libertarianism, from A to Z by Jeffrey A. Miron (New York: Basic Books, 2010); 198 pages. More and more Americans are coming to realize that the liberal/conservative paradigm is deeply flawed. Disillusionment with Washington is at an all-time high. The old adage that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties has never seemed more ...