Freedom Daily Archive

Barack Obama’s America [Must] Serve Plan

by Scott Shields December 1, 2009

Throughout Barack Obamas campaign for president, he expressed his desire to increase community service in America. He outlined his plan, called America Serves, on change.gov, the website that provided details of his presidential agenda and transition. A screen-shot of America Serves is still available at www.politicallore. com/images/change.jpg. President Obamas plan for community service is now described as a part of ...

Alienating the Inalienable

by Hannah Hoffman December 1, 2009

The freedom movement is inspiring in many ways. It promotes a peaceful, liberated society in which people can be free to pursue their own ideas. Yet I find it ironic that while most involved in the freedom movement recognize the idea of personal liberty, many still hold an anti-liberty, anti-immigration view. When it comes to inalienable rights with which all ...

Government Caused the Meltdown

by George Leef December 1, 2009

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods (Regnery, 2009); 194 pages. Thomas Woodss Meltdown is a truly radical book. That is to say, it probes to the root ...

Liberal Delusions about Freedom

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2009

To combat the town-hall protests that sprang up around the nation against President Obama’s health-care plan, one of the favorite tactics employed by liberals was to question the sanity of the protesters. Anyone who showed up at such meetings angrily protesting Obama’s plan to socialize medicine was termed a crazy. That was especially true if a protester happened to be ...

Nationalized Health Care and Economic Fallacy

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2009

It takes a discussion of the role of government in health care to really bring out the economic illiteracy among the politicians and commentariat. The long list of fallacies they have uttered about markets and government is truly stunning. Take competition. President Obama, after several unsuccessful attempts at selling his plan to redesign 15 percent of the U.S. economy, turned ...

Frightening Voters into Submission

by James Bovard November 1, 2009

Former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has a new book out that reveals that he almost resigned because the Bush administration was hustling bogus terror alerts before the 2004 election. Ridge’s revelation was not surprising to people who had closely followed the tactics Bush used to snare a second term. During the 2004 campaign, residents of swing states were under ...

Langdon, Stark, Bennington, and the Triumph of a Private Army, Part 3

by Scott McPherson November 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The Battle of Bennington Despite some gallant and spirited attempts to resist Burgoyne’s advance through the summer of 1777, the Continental Army’s Northern Department, first under Horatio Gates, then under Philip Schuyler, then under Gates again, was not inspiring much confidence. “The withdrawal from Ticonderoga reinforced Stark’s view that the northern ...

Keynes and the Assault on Savings, Part 2

by Gregory Bresiger November 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 The reason, I believe, that Keynes’s anti-saving, consume-more philosophy is politically popular is simple: Consumption is immediate and usually enjoyable. Saving requires self-discipline and patience. Also, the philosophy is remarkably bi-partisan. It fits in with the ideas of a massive and ever-growing welfare/warfare state. This ...

The Evil of Sanctions, Part 1

by Brian Cloughley November 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 When strong governments wish to impose their will on weaker regimes, they often resort to sanctions. The effects have included the death or debilitation of millions of innocent people. Two good examples are Cuba, on which draconian U.S. sanctions have been enforced since 1960, and Iraq, where brutal sanctions were enforced from 1990 to ...

Intervention and Economic Crisis

by Thomas E. Woods Jr. November 1, 2009

No supporter of the market economy could have been surprised when the recent financial crisis was inevitably blamed on “capitalism” and “deregulation.” The free market, we were told, was a recipe for financial instability. “Advocates of the free market must confront the fact that both the Great Depression and the current financial chaos were preceded by years of laissez-faire ...

The CIA, Assassination, and the War on Terrorism

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2009

In late July, the New York Times disclosed a secret plan by the CIA to assassinate suspected terrorists around the globe. According to the Times, the agency decided against implementing the plan, possibly because of the risk of being prosecuted for murder in countries in which the assassinations would take place. Actually, it’s not at all clear yet that the CIA is ...

Democratic Misrepresentation

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 2009

If you want to know how representative government works not in airy theory but on the ground, contemplate these facts: (1) Except perhaps for the rarest exception, no member of Congress will have read the entire final 1,000-plus-page bill that seeks, in the New York Times’s words, to “reinvent the nation’s health care system”; and (2) in July the ...