Daily Articles

The Tyranny of Trigger Words and College Safe Spaces

by Richard M. Ebeling June 8, 2015

The media has been full of stories recently about the new sensitivity on college and university campuses concerning the avoidance in courses or assignments of the use of “trigger words” or phrases that may have a “hurtful” affect on students when thoughtlessly used in the teaching environment. Student and other groups on campuses have insisted that professors provide advanced warning ...

Are There Rules for Trade?

by Laurence M. Vance June 4, 2015

Barack Obama has been lobbying Congress for Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as “fast-track authority,” so the executive branch can work in secret on trade deals before submitting them to Congress for a quick up-or-down vote with limited time for debate, no provision for amendments, and no possibility of a Senate filibuster. The president has made passage of the ...

The Libertarian Angle with Pete Boettke – Luminaries in Austrian Economics

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 2, 2015

Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week, Jacob and guest co-host Peter Boettke talks about the history of Austrian economics. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast here.

Keynesian Medicines are Not a Cure for China’s Ills

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2015

Keynesians never seem to learn. Every time an economy slows down or reverses gears and “goes negative,” in terms of growth and employment, their only answer is a call for “aggregate demand” stimulus and more government spending manipulation. An example of this is a recent article by Washington Post columnist, Robert Samuelson raising the question, “China’s Coming Crash?” (May 24, ...

Why We Don’t Compromise, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2  | Part 3 | Part 4 |  Part 5 | Part 6 In fighting for the free society, people necessarily must determine what it means to be free. Freedom obviously has many different dimensions. Religious liberty entails the freedom to worship God or not, without state compulsion one way ...

The Supreme Court’s Dreadful Record on Freedom

by James Bovard June 1, 2015

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the legality of the Affordable Care Act this past March. Several justices questioned whether a ruling against Obamacare would be “unconstitutionally coercive” to state governments that did not create health-care exchanges. The Supreme Court is sometimes hypersensitive about the authority of state governments when federalism issues are raised. But at the same ...

The Simplicity of Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2015

Libertarianism has been defined as an ethical system that seeks to preserve the liberty of individuals and as a political philosophy concerned with the permissible use of force or violence. These are two sides of the same coin. As libertarianism’s greatest theorist, Murray Rothbard, explained, Libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it ...

Penalty of Surrender

by Leonard Read June 1, 2015

A certain business leader, perhaps among the most publicized during the last two decades, once severely lectured me on my unswerving and uncompromising behavior. He charged that I saw things only in blacks and whites. He argued that practical life was lived in shades of grays, actually in the shadows of these two extremes. He suggested that I had ...

Innovation, Patents, and the Industrial Revolution

by David K. Levine June 1, 2015

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: The Story of Steam, Industry and Invention by William Rosen (University of Chicago Press 2012), 376 pages. This is the story of an important microcosm of the Industrial Revolution: the development of the railroad. Although the story is one of personalities — and the book is engaging and a good read ...

Militarism: Our Civic Religion

by Michael Swanson June 1, 2015

Militarism, U.S.A by Col. James Donovan; Foreword by Gen. David Shoup (Scribner’s 1970), 265 pages Today the United States is engaged in seemingly winless wars without end in Iraq and Afghanistan and has been engaging in interventions in places such as Libya, which seem to result in nothing but chaos. Libya has descended into civil war and the rise ...

Empire, Security, and the War State

by David S. D'Amato June 1, 2015

The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945–1963 by Michael Swanson (CreateSpace 2013), 430 pages. In the October 1958 issue of The New Yorker, near the high-water mark of McCarthyism, the novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy famously wrote, “Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.” ...

The JFK Autopsy Cover-Up: The Testimony of Saundra Spencer

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 28, 2015

Ever since people began questioning the official findings of the Warren Commission regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the popular retort of Warren Commission supporters has been “Conspiracy theory!” That retort was somewhat successful in the early years — that is, during the time that the CIA and the Pentagon were successful in keeping their records relating to ...