Freedom Daily Archive

America’s Anti-Militarist Heritage

by George Leef January 1, 2009

Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism by Bill Kauffman (Metropolitan Books, 2008); 284 pages, $25. Americans don’t have much historical memory anymore. That isn’t just because of the dumbing down of the educational system and the fact that most young people read very ...

The Socialist Bailout of Wall Street, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2008

Part 1 | Part 2 The massive federal bailout of U.S. financial firms reflects everything that’s wrong with the economic system of welfare and interventionism under which the United States has operated since at least the 1930s. There are critically important lessons in the bailout that the American people ignore at their peril. While most politicians and mainstream pundits ...

Government Failure

by Sheldon Richman December 1, 2008

To hear the media pundits and presidential candidates tell it, you’d think Adam Smith had been president for the last eight years and, with a Congress full of free-market advocates, had enacted an agenda of full-blown laissez faire. Had that been the case, we would not be in the mess we are in economically. Alas, it has not been the ...

How Abu Ghraib Was Politically Defused, Part 2

by James Bovard December 1, 2008

Part 1 | Part 2 From the first days of the torture scandal, the Bush administration followed a “deny everything and praise American values” strategy to defuse the controversy over Abu Ghraib. In a May 28, 2004, interview, a French journalist mentioned Abu Ghraib and asked President Bush, “Do you feel responsible in any way for this moral failure in ...

Regime Change: Promise and Peril, Part 1

by Stephen Kinzer December 1, 2008

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 This article is a transcript of Stephen Kinzer’s speech given on June 6, 2008, at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s conference “Restoring the Republic 2008: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.” Thomas Jefferson is the author of the phrase that I take as my guiding principle, and it’s the principle that ...

When Government Replaces God and Family

by Christine Smith December 1, 2008

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men. — Mortimer Adler It is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. It knows best what we need and what must be done. We must trust in its absolute power, knowledge, and presence in all areas of our lives. For this overseer is ...

The Crusade Against Population

by George Leef December 1, 2008

Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits by Steven W. Mosher (Transaction Publishers, 2008); 300 pages. You have probably never heard of Dr. Reimert Ravenholt, but he was one of the most influential people of the 20th century. More than anyone else, Ravenholt was responsible for putting together the worldwide network ...

Why Does America Have a Drug War?

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2008

Given that most people agree that the drug war has failed to achieve its supposed purpose after decades of warfare, an important question arises: Why is the drug war still being waged, especially when we consider all the collateral damage that this federal program has produced? Hasn’t the time arrived for Americans to demand an immediate end to the ...

Bushs Dangerous Game in the South Caucasus

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2008

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of ...

How Abu Ghraib Was Politically Defused, Part 1

by James Bovard November 1, 2008

Part 1 | Part 2 It is now more than four and a half years since Americans first saw the photos depicting the brutalizing of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At that time, some commentators thought that the photos would be a political disaster for the Bush administration, perhaps even imperiling the president’s reelection. However, the Bush ...

Fair-Housing Fascism

by George Leef November 1, 2008

In his recent book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg argues that most of the liberal political agenda is fascistic, in the true meaning of the word. Fascism is a system based on the use of governmental directives to control private property. Whereas communists simply confiscate private property particularly what they call the means of production fascists ...

Property Rights, Freedom, and the Constitution

by Rick Lynch November 1, 2008

It is simply impossible to understand the U.S. Constitution without first possessing a thorough understanding of property rights. If you traveled back in time to enter James Madison’s mind as he wrote and debated such weighty issues as free speech, the right of self-defense, freedom of the press, and freedom of conscience, but came away lacking knowledge of his ...