Daily Articles

How Food Stamps Subverted Democracy, Part 2

by James Bovard January 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Last month we saw how political demagoguery helped make hunger a major issue in American politics beginning in the late 1960s. After Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, liberals and their media allies largely declared victory over hunger. Carter was a humane progressive and there was no ...

It Is Congress That Needs to Be Limited

by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2017

Standing near the Long Island Expressway (LIE) — with tractor-trailers zooming by — U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to swiftly finalize a proposed rule that would require electronic speed-limiting devices in large trucks, buses, and school buses that weigh more than 26,000 pounds. Said the senator in a press release, For ...

Money on the Table

by Richard W. Fulmer January 1, 2017

There’s an old economists’ joke about two university professors who are walking through the school’s cafeteria. The first professor, an engineer, points to an empty table and says, “Look, someone left a twenty-dollar bill.” The second professor, an economist, replies, “Nonsense. Someone would have already picked it up.” The point of the joke is that, in a free market, explanations ...

Freedom in Transactions

by Fredric Bastiat January 1, 2017

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — here are a million human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities that must enter tomorrow through the ...

End the Fed

by George Leef January 1, 2017

Who Needs the Fed? by John Tamny (Encounter Books, 2016); 224 pages. I really don’t like to start a review with a quibble, but in this instance, I must. My quibble is with the title of the book, which makes it seem as though it is aimed only at knocking out support for the Federal Reserve ...

How Would the Baby in a Manger Fare in the American Police State?

by John W. Whitehead December 22, 2016

“Jesus is too much for us. The church’s later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from ‘extremism.’” —author Gary Wills, What Jesus Meant Jesus was good. He was caring. He had powerful, profound things to say—things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. He went around ...

The Libertarian Angle: Trump’s Cabinet Picks, Part 3

by Future of Freedom Foundation December 21, 2016

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling talk about the choices that president-elect Donald Trump has been making for his cabinet. Go to the podcast.

Help FFF Spread the Ideas of Liberty

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 20, 2016

Before I was to deliver a speech at a recent conference in Virginia, a young woman introduced herself and told me that a quotation of mine, which she had read on the Internet when she was in the 8th grade, had shifted the course of her life by leading her to explore libertarianism. She was so struck by the ...

Lew Rockwell: Time to End the War on Drugs

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. December 20, 2016

Watch Lew Rockwell present his perspectives on why America needs to end the war on drugs. This presentation is part of FFF’s Drug War Video Project, whose aim is to accelerate the end of this immoral and destructive government program.

Economic Ideas: Adam Smith on Free Trade, Crony Capitalism, and the Benefits from Commercial Society

by Richard M. Ebeling December 19, 2016

Adam Smith’s central contribution to economic understanding was surely his demonstration that under an institutional arrangement of individual liberty, property rights, and voluntary exchange the self-interested conduct of market participants could be shown to be consistent with a general betterment of the human condition. The emergence of a social system of division of labor makes men interdependent for the necessities, ...

How to Beat the Post-Election Blues

by John W. Whitehead December 16, 2016

“I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.” ―  Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Christmas I keep waiting to encounter the “kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant” Christmastime environment that Charles Dickens describes in A Christmas Carol: “when men and women seem by one consent ...

The Libertarian Angle: Trump’s Cabinet Picks, Part 2

by Future of Freedom Foundation December 14, 2016

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling talk about the choices that president-elect Donald Trump has been making for his cabinet. Go to the podcast.