Yes, Virginia, There is No Political Santa Claus by Richard M. Ebeling December 29, 2014 At a time of the year when gift giving and charitable good spirit fills the air, please allow me to be the one who rains on the parade: “Yes, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus!” I don’t mean the Santa who comes down the chimney with toys for every girl and boy. This is the Santa who really is Mom ...
State Heretics and State Infidels by Wendy McElroy December 22, 2014 The term statolatry refers to worshiping the state as the source of goodness to which all else should be subordinated. In statolatry, instead of having a separation of church and state, the state replaces the church and becomes its own religion. In his book Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, Ludwig von Mises ...
TGIF: Monopoly and Aggression by Sheldon Richman December 19, 2014 The concepts monopoly and aggression are intimately related, like lock and key, or mother and son. You cannot fully understand the first without understanding the second. Most of us are taught to think of a monopoly as simply any lone seller of a good or service, but this definition is fraught with problems, as Murray Rothbard, Austrian economists generally, and ...
Achieving Freedom Now (video) by Jacob G. Hornberger December 18, 2014 Please consider supporting the work of The Future of Freedom Foundation. You can donate here.
What about the Detainees in U.S. Prisons? by Laurence M. Vance December 18, 2014 The United States has finally released the last three detainees from the Parwan Detention Center in Afghanistan. “The Defense Department no longer operates detention facilities in Afghanistan nor maintains custody of any detainees,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Myles Caggins told The Associated Press. Two of the detainees were transferred to Afghan custody for possible prosecution and a third ...
Getting Away with Torture by Sheldon Richman December 17, 2014 Now we have it straight from the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Dianne Feinstein: Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured. I also believe that the conditions of confinement and the use of authorized and unauthorized interrogation and conditioning techniques were cruel, inhuman, and degrading. I believe the evidence of this is ...
The False Promises of Two Percent Price Inflation by Richard M. Ebeling December 16, 2014 A specter is haunting the world, the specter of two percent inflationism. Whether pronounced by the U.S. Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, or from the Bank of Japan, many monetary central planners have declared their determination to impose a certain minimum of rising prices on their societies and economies. One of the ...
The Libertarian Angle: The Torture Scandal (video) by Future of Freedom Foundation December 15, 2014 FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: the recent release of the Senate Torture Report. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.
TGIF: “And the Pursuit of Happiness”: Nathaniel Branden, RIP by Sheldon Richman December 12, 2014 Libertarians and others have wondered why Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence concludes its explicitly incomplete list of unalienable rights with the pursuit of happiness rather than property. The website Monticello.org states, Unfortunately, Thomas Jefferson himself never explained his use of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. However, he was almost certainly influenced by George ...
The Purism vs. Gradualism Libertarian Debate Is Over by Jacob G. Hornberger December 12, 2014 When I founded The Future of Freedom Foundation twenty-five years ago, the debate that was raging within the libertarian movement was between the purists and the gradualists. The debate centered on whether libertarians should stand for the immediate repeal of socialist and interventionist programs or whether they should endorse reform measures that would supposedly get us to the free ...
The Case for Monetary Freedom and Free Banking by Richard M. Ebeling December 11, 2014 There has been no greater threat to life, liberty, and property throughout the ages than government. Even the most violent and brutal private individuals have been able to inflict only a mere fraction of the harm and destruction that have been caused by the use of power by political authorities. The pursuit of legal plunder, to use Frédéric Bastiat’s well-chosen ...
I Love Loosies and the People Who Sell Them by Sheldon Richman December 10, 2014 The cops who ganged up on Eric Garner, got him into a chokehold, and mashed his face into the sidewalk didn’t intend to kill him. They intended only to show him who’s boss on the streets of Staten Island — and show him in a way he would never forget. As a Facebook friend of mine put it, instead they ...