Daily Articles

A Military Coup in America?

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2016

Ever since I started writing about the assassination of John F. Kennedy several years ago, people have been asking me why I do it. Since the event happened 53 years ago this month, what possible relevance could the assassination have to Americans living today? Even if Kennedy had been the victim of a conspiracy, wouldn’t the malefactors probably be ...

The Great Goober Train Wreck of 2016

by James Bovard November 1, 2016

The history of federal peanut policy is the perfect antidote to anyone who still believes that Congress could competently manage a lemonade stand. Federal spending for peanut subsidies will have risen eightfold between last year and next year — reaching almost a billion dollars and approaching the total value of the peanut harvest. This debacle is only the latest ...

The Change America Needs Is Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance November 1, 2016

The French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808–1890) famously said that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” This epigram is a perfect description of the American electoral process. Americans elect a new president every four years. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives have a two-year term. U.S. senators are elected for six years. That means that ...

The New Deal, Part 1: Domestic Policy

by Joseph R. Stromberg November 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 Today, few Americans are left from the Greatest Generation (a phrase which my father, born in 1912, would have seen as obvious propaganda). There are more, perhaps, who experienced the New Deal directly as very small children. Most of us know it only from history, family lore, popular culture, film, and (yes) ...

The Right to Try to Live

by George Leef November 1, 2016

The Right to Try: How the Federal Government Prevents Americans from Getting the Lifesaving Treatments They Need by Darcy Olsen (HarperCollins, 2015); 311 pages. The highly acclaimed 2013 movie Dallas Buyers Club told the story of Ron Woodroof, who tried desperately to get drugs that might help arrest Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome back in the mid 1980s. ...

Economic Ideas: The French Physiocrats and the Case for Laissez-faire.

by Richard M. Ebeling October 31, 2016

In the middle decades of the eighteenth century two schools of thought emerged, one in France and the other in Great Britain that were critical of Mercantilism, the government system of economic planning and regulation in the 1700s. In Great Britain, the primary thinkers were members of what has become known as the Scottish Moral Philosophers. In France the ...

The Path to Total Dictatorship

by John W. Whitehead October 28, 2016

“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party ...

Entrepreneurship, the Market Economy and Human Betterment

by Richard M. Ebeling October 27, 2016

Through almost all mankind’s history, the human condition was one of abject poverty and hardship. Yes, there were kings and princes and religious orders that lived better than the mass of humanity. But when looking back at their standards of living, even the most privileged and powerful political leader or tribal chieftain spent his life in a material condition ...

The Libertarian Angle: The Philippines Divorces the U.S.

by Future of Freedom Foundation October 26, 2016

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling discuss the recent actions of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in denouncing the role of the U.S. in Philippines' history and severing ties with the U.S. military. Go to the podcast.

The Latest Excuse for the Drug War

by Laurence M. Vance October 25, 2016

According to a new report released by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, every 25 seconds in the United States someone is arrested for drug possession. It is not surprising to read in the report that Police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime. Police made more arrests for simple marijuana ...

An Introduction to Austrian Economics, Part 9

by Richard M. Ebeling October 24, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLzicAlsImY Monetary Mischief: Booms and Busts Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 Purchase Richard Ebeling’s related ebook “Austrian Economics & Public Policy” at Amazon.com.

Economic Ideas: Mercantilism as Monarchy’s Planned Economy

by Richard M. Ebeling October 24, 2016

The Feudal System had resulted in the disintegration of the unity that much of Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe had known under the Roman Empire. Following the fall of Rome, Europe was divided into local and regional political and economic entities, each politically functioning and economically surviving in high degrees of isolation from each other. However, beginning in the fifteenth ...