Freedom Daily Archive

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 ...

Thank Goodness for WikiLeaks

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2011

WikiLeaks has released close to 400,000 U.S. classified military documents relating to the Iraq war. The American people, the theoretical masters of the government, were not supposed to see them. So, just as it was when the website released 77,000 documents on the Afghan war in August, WikiLeaks was roundly condemned. Unnamed officials in the Obama administration are reported ...

Misdefining Liberty

by James Bovard January 1, 2011

The definitions of liberty devised in ivory towers and elsewhere have a profound impact on political and judicial thinking. Regardless of how wrongheaded some concepts of liberty prevalent early last century may now appear, America’s legal structure is now based on those ideas. And that legal structure continues binding today’s citizens to the intellectual follies of previous generations of ...

Forget Reform

by Bart Frazier January 1, 2011

Reforming federal programs that have bestowed upon Americans a multitude of problems would seem to be a good idea, but it’s not. The problem is not only that the programs will never work no matter how much they are reformed, but also that what the programs do falls outside the legitimate functions of government. The programs need to be ...

Where Is the Tea Party Revolution on Foreign Policy?

by Stephen Kinzer January 1, 2011

America’s latest populist movement, which reaches back to revolutionary history by calling itself the “Tea Party,” helped shape the remarkable results of last November’s midterm election. Some dare to hope that candidates elected in that political uprising might help arrest America’s alarming decline. Others see the uprising as no more than a cover for the corporate power that lay ...