Overtime Pay and a Free Society by Laurence M. Vance July 10, 2015 If there is only one thing that every American worker who gets paid by the hour knows about labor law aside from the minimum wage, it is that employers must pay time and a half for all hours worked over 40 hours. What many American hourly workers probably don’t realize, however, is that some salaried workers are eligible for ...
The Libertarian Angle – Independence Day by Jacob G. Hornberger July 7, 2015 Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week, celebrating Independence Day. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.
The Emergence of Orwellian Newspeak and the Death of Free Speech by John W. Whitehead July 1, 2015 “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it…. Give the people ...
Why We Don’t Compromise, Part 3 by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2015 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Suppose 100 percent of libertarians called for a reform, rather than a dismantling, of the welfare-warfare state way of life under which Americans today live. What would be the chances of achieving the free ...
The Mandatory Voting Panacea by James Bovard July 1, 2015 Barack Obama suggested on March 18, 2015, that mandatory voting could cure some of the ills of American democracy. He said that compelling everyone to vote would “encourage more participation” — perhaps the same way that the specter of prison sentences encourages more people to pay taxes. While there are many good reasons to oppose mandatory voting, compulsory balloting ...
Build It and They Will Come by Laurence M. Vance July 1, 2015 The city of Los Angeles is the country’s second-largest media market. Yet, the city has not had an NFL football team to call its own since the 1994 season, when the Rams and the Raiders each played their last games there. After beginning in Cleveland, the Rams called Los Angeles home from 1946 to 1994 before moving to St. ...
When the Supreme Court Stopped Economic Fascism in America by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2015 There was a time when the Supreme Court of the United States defended and upheld the constitutional protections for economic liberty in America. This year marks the 80th anniversary of one of the Supreme Court’s finest hours, when it overturned Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda for economic fascism in the United States. The trend towards bigger and ever-more-intrusive government, unfortunately, was not ...
The Inherent Criminality of Air Power by Joseph R. Stromberg July 1, 2015 Constant American bombing of much of the world ought to raise questions about the morality (if any) of air power, even if few Americans bother to confront them. (Indeed, many moral theorists would rather apply their theorizing and “intuitions” to runaway trolley cars than to the real-world problem posed here.) Air power first showed its long-imagined potential in World War ...
The Case for Economic Freedom by Benjamin A. Rogge July 1, 2015 I shall identify my brand of economics as that of economic freedom, and I shall define economic freedom as that set of economic arrangements that would exist in a society in which the government’s only function would be to prevent one man from using force or fraud against another — including within this, of course, the task of national ...
Prohibition’s Killing Fields by Matthew Harwood July 1, 2015 Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 400 pages. When American bombs began to rain down on Vietnam, the country’s water buffalo reacted queerly. The fields full of opium had always been there, but once the U.S. munitions fell around them, the water buffalo left their pastures ...
The Libertarian Angle: World War II–The Good War That Wasn’t by Jacob G. Hornberger June 30, 2015 Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week, Jacob and guest co-host Ted Grimsrun discuss World War II and Ted's book The Good War That Wasn't -- and Why It Matters. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast here.
F. A. Hayek and Why Government Can’t Manage Society, Part II by Richard M. Ebeling June 29, 2015 It is seventy years, now, since near the end of the Second World War Austrian economist, and much later Nobel Prize winner, Friedrich A. Hayek published his most famous article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in September 1945, demonstrating why it is impossible for a system of socialist central planning to effectively manage a complex and ever-changing economy ...