Freedom Daily Archive

Destroying the Everglades

by Bart Frazier June 1, 2007

When most people think of southern Florida, they conjure up images of Disney World and spring break. Yet further south than Mickey and Daytona International Speedway are the Florida Everglades, one of the most unusual ecosystems in the world and a true mecca for wildlife enthusiasts. Over the past half century, ...

The Diagnosis of a Dying Republic, Part 1

by Anthony Gregory June 1, 2007

Part 1 | Part 2 Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 368 pages; $26. About 10 years ago, we libertarians were accustomed to hearing constitutionalist conservatives voicing our shared concern about the American ...

Empire or Freedom?

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2007

The 9/11 attacks brought to the surface a dilemma that everyone, especially libertarians, must now confront: whether to choose a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy or a free society. No one can deny that we now live in a country in which the president, on his own initiative, has the omnipotent power to send the nation into war against any country ...

New Deal, Old Deal

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2007

It’s commonly held that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a radical break with America’s past. Both fans and foes of Roosevelt embrace this position. Many libertarians join conservatives in believing that things were going satisfactorily in the United States until Roosevelt got his hands on power. Some take a slightly ...

What Do Citizens Owe Government?

by James Bovard May 1, 2007

When politicians are not promising new benefits to citizens, they continually remind citizens what they owe the government. From their first years in government schools, children are indoctrinated with the notion that government provides them some grandiose benefit. This seed often produces a harvest of servility in later life. But few people stop and ...

That Horrible Income Gap

by George Leef May 1, 2007

Karl Marx’s biggest selling point has always been his argument that workers are systematically underpaid under capitalism. They produce value and greedy capitalist owners cheat them out of it. Good economists have understood for centuries that in a free (and therefore competitive) labor market, it isn’t possible to underpay anyone for long. That fact, however, ...

What the Warfare State Really Costs

by Thomas E. Woods Jr. May 1, 2007

Estimates of the cost of the Iraq war continue to escalate to levels well beyond what its optimistic architects once promised. Most notable, perhaps, has been the estimate of Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz, who, in a January 2006 paper with Harvard’s Linda Bilmes, put the full cost at around $2 trillion. ...

The Nanny State’s Road to Serfdom

by Jeffrey A. Singer May 1, 2007

A reader wrote me about my article “The Slippery Slope of Nanny-State Politics,” which appeared in the last issue of Freedom Daily. The article derided the rise of the “nanny state” and its threat to our way of life as a free people. I had written that New York ...

Sophie Scholl: A Life of Moral Courage

by Wendy McElroy May 1, 2007

The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Die letzten Tage) depicts the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Magdalena Scholl (May 9, 1921 February 22, 1943). Sophie and her brother, Hans, were leading members of a nonviolent resistance group called the White Rose. Five students in their early twenties formed the group in 1942 at the University of Munich. The ...

Why Germans Supported Hitler, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2007

Part 1 | Part 2 The most remarkable part of the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is the courtroom scene, which is based on recently discovered German archives. Sophie and her brother Hans, along with their friend Christoph Probst, stand before the infamous Roland Freisler, presiding judge of the People’s Court, whom Hitler had immediately sent to Munich ...

Thank You, Congress, for Not Taking It All

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2007

If the government isn’t taking 100 percent of your income, you should be grateful for Congress’s generosity. Because in the eyes of the Bush administration, that’s exactly what it is, generosity. You have no right to what you earn or any other money you might get hold of. In principle it ...

War Lies and the 2004 Election

by James Bovard April 1, 2007

Shortly after he was reelected, President Bush declared that American voters had had their “moment of accountability” regarding the Iraq war. Since he had gotten slightly more than 50 percent of the votes in the November 2004 election, that meant that they had ratified his policies and that Bush was ...