Daily Articles

The Libertarian Angle: Trial by Jury

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 12, 2015

Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week, the folly of the minimum wage. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Podcast here.

Spending and Redistribution are Not the Answers to Slow Growth

by Richard M. Ebeling May 11, 2015

Old fallacies never seem to die, they just fade away to reemerge once again later on. One such fallacy is that if there is significant unemployment and slow economic growth it must be due to not enough consumers’ spending in the economy, what Keynesian economists call a “failure of aggregate demand.” This fallacy has been voiced, once more, in a ...

The Libertarian Angle: Iraq and Other Foreign-Policy Disasters

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 6, 2015

Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger discusses the hot topics of the day. This week, Jacob and guest co-host Scott Horton discuss the folly of U.S. foreign policy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast here.

Employment and a Free Society

by Laurence M. Vance May 5, 2015

The city of SeaTac, Washington, is the home of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. It is also home to the highest minimum wage in the country. SeaTac’s minimum wage of $15 an hour took effect on January 1, 2014, the result of a ballot initiative. The minimum wage in the cities of San Francisco and Seattle is scheduled to gradually ...

Free Trade Benefits vs. Fears of Foreign Goods

by Richard M. Ebeling May 4, 2015

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke before a joint session of the U.S. Congress on April 29, 2015 and offered his “eternal condolences to the souls of all American people that were lost during World War II,” but never directly said that he was sorry for Imperial Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The real purpose ...

Why We Don’t Compromise, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2  | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Ever since our inception in 1989, The Future of Freedom Foundation has had a firm policy against compromising libertarian principles. The reason is: We want to live in a free society, and we believe that principles hold the ...

The Poison Called Nationalism

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2015

  Forward, the Light Brigade! Was there a man dismay’d? Not tho’ the soldier knew Someone had blunder’d: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” The reason for the venom directed at those of us who question American sniper Chris Kyle’s status ...

Eric Holder’s Leviathan-Loving Legacy

by James Bovard May 1, 2015

Last summer, Attorney General Eric Holder solemnly declared, “The name ought to be changed. It’s an offensive name.” Holder observed that despite the organization’s “storied history,” it could “increase their fan base” by changing their name — “if they did something that from my perspective that is so obviously right.” Unfortunately, Holder was referring to the name of the Washington ...

America as the Neo-British Empire

by Joseph R. Stromberg May 1, 2015

Foreign-policy realists and relative noninterventionists, among others, want to commit Americans to offshore balancing, an idea drawn from various English political-economic sources. After the Glorious Revolution (1688) securing the Protestant succession, influential English statesmen sought to make European balance-keeping central to their foreign strategy. Another view, deducible from 19th-century British practice (and formally called Hegemonic Stability Theory), wants the ...

Government versus Progress

by George Leef May 1, 2015

Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good by Tom W. Bell (Mercatus Center 2014), 238 pages. Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom by Adam Thierer (Mercatus Center 2014), 1089 pages. These books cover two different aspects of the same phenomenon — how laws and regulations obstruct progress. Tom Bell’s Intellectual Privilege examines copyright law, which ...

How Technology Can Create Political Change

by Kevin Carson May 1, 2015

Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker (Liberty.me 2015), Kindle, 130 pages (estimated). Jeffrey Tucker opens with the story of Fereshteh Forough, who set up a chain of clinics in Afghanistan to empower women by teaching them coding, design, and other computer skills that they could market directly on the web. The problem they ...

Stop the Wars on Drugs & Terrorism (video)

by Future of Freedom Foundation April 30, 2015

The Future of Freedom Foundation and Young Americans for Liberty presented a one-day conference on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin at the LBJ Auditorium in the Lyndon B. Johnson Library on Saturday, April 11, 2015, that addressed the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. “Stop the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism” featured an ...