Playing the Government’s Game by John W. Whitehead January 6, 2016 “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence ...
The Libertarian Angle: Presidential Candidates and the Status Quo by Future of Freedom Foundation January 5, 2016 Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger and Richard M. Ebeling discuss the hot topics of the day. This week, Jacob and Richard review the candidates for the upcoming presidential election. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.
The Government Must Stop Printing Phony Money by Richard M. Ebeling January 4, 2016 If advocates of freedom were to make up a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2016, one of the most important items should be ending government’s monopoly control over money. In a free society, people in the marketplace should decide what they wish to use as money, not the government. For more than two hundred years, practically all of even ...
Gun Control and the Right to Resist Tyranny by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2016 If Jews in Nazi Germany had been free to own guns, would that have diminished the impact of the Holocaust? GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson candidate set off a political firestorm by proclaiming that it would have. Gun-rights critics went on the attack, saying that the right to bear arms would have had no effect on the number of Jews ...
Supreme Fashion Reject by James Bovard January 1, 2016 “You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth,” the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen declared in his famous play An Enemy of the People. Unfortunately, the justices on the Supreme Court of the United States — the sacred burial ground of Americans’ rights and liberties — are not members of Ibsen’s ...
The Libertarian Solution by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2016 The United States of America is facing some major issues in the twenty-first century. The national debt is $18.5 trillion. The budget deficit is $500 billion. Homelessness is widespread in most major cities. Student-loan debt is more than a trillion dollars. Social Security and Medicare are insolvent. Government spending continues to skyrocket. There are more than 45 million Americans ...
Closed-Border Libertarians: It’s Time to End the War on Immigration by Will Tippens January 1, 2016 Warrantless searches and seizures on a massive scale, bureaucratic logjams, arbitrary edicts that squelch freedom of association, unchecked waste and corruption — it is difficult to reconcile any of these symptoms of big government with liberty. And yet, many who strongly value freedom still support all of them in the name of border control. For these “closed-border libertarians”, the argument ...
Welcome Back to Freedom by Matthew Harwood January 1, 2016 The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by Jamie Bartlett (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2015), 320 pages. Do you really want someone to die? If you could help bring about someone’s demise by anonymously and securely placing a bet on when that particular someone might take a dirtnap, would you? That’s the premise of the Assassination Market, an ...
The Tyranny of Eminent Domain by David S. D'Amato January 1, 2016 The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain by Ilya Somin (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 336 pages. The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London has become infamous, singled out by defenders of liberty and property for special opprobrium. The Court’s opinion was a sobering reminder ...
Support FFF: With Crises Come Opportunities for Freedom by Jacob G. Hornberger December 31, 2015 I am writing to seek your financial support to help us continue the battle for liberty in the year ahead. The advocates of the welfare-warfare state say that paternalism is freedom, compulsory charity is a virtue, federal spending and debt will bring prosperity, and perpetual war will bring peace. Their world is ...
What’s in Store for Our Freedoms in 2016? More of Everything We Don’t Want by John W. Whitehead December 30, 2015 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”—George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 1 In Harold Ramis’ classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, TV weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) is forced to live the same day over and over again until he not only gains some insight into his life but changes his priorities. Similarly, as I ...
The Libertarian Angle – Prospects for Liberty in 2016 by Future of Freedom Foundation December 29, 2015 Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger and Richard M. Ebeling discuss the hot topics of the day. This week, Jacob and Richard review what is coming in the year ahead. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.