Daily Articles

TGIF: What Are Libertarians Out to Accomplish?

by Sheldon Richman January 23, 2015

When I was researching my recent article on Nathaniel Branden, who died last month, I came across an audio file of a talk Branden gave at the 1979 Libertarian Party national convention in Los Angeles. I was at the convention, but I don’t remember attending the talk. I might have been busy with other things; on the ...

Two Kinds of Income Inequality

by Sheldon Richman January 22, 2015

Income inequality is back in the news, propelled by an Oxfam International report and President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. The question is whether government needs to do something about this — or whether government needs to undo many things. Measuring income inequality is no simple thing, which is one source of disagreement between ...

Sunday Shopping

by Laurence M. Vance January 22, 2015

Just before Christmas, the country of Hungary joined other European countries such as Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in banning Sunday shopping. Although the Hungarian Parliament passed the bill on December 16, it isn’t scheduled to take effect until March 15 of this year. The legislation, which was supported by the prime minister but opposed by the economy minister, ...

The Libertarian Angle: Charlie Hebdo and Gun Control

by Future of Freedom Foundation January 20, 2015

Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: that attacks in Paris and their relation to gun control. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.

Global Free Trade Makes for Mutual Prosperity and World Peace

by Richard M. Ebeling January 20, 2015

The recent brutal events in France have reminded us how small the world is that we all share. Violence and conflicts that have their origin in one part of the globe shows itself in another part of our planet. And mass media immediately shares those events to the rest of us, no matter where we are. The impression that is ...

TGIF: The Open Society and Its Worst Enemies

by Sheldon Richman January 16, 2015

Last week’s bloody events in Paris demonstrate yet again that a noninterventionist foreign policy, far from being a luxury, is an urgent necessity -- literally a matter of life and death. A government that repeatedly wages wars of aggression — the most extreme form of extremism — endangers the society it ostensibly protects by gratuitously making enemies, some of whom will seek revenge against ...

Understanding the Paris Violence

by Sheldon Richman January 14, 2015

Contrary to American officialdom and its stalwart “manufacturers of consent” — the intelligentsia and mainstream media — we will never comprehend the reasons for the slaughter of 17 innocent people in Paris as long as we ignore the history of Western violence against the Muslim world. Perpetrators and cheerleaders of Western violence stifle discussion of what motivates young Muslims to ...

L’affaire Charlie Hebdo and Western Colonialism

by John V. Walsh January 14, 2015

To understand the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week, we need only invert George W. Bush’s 2005 mantra*, thus: “They will continue to attack us over here so long as we slaughter them by the millions over there.” In a word, this is one more instance of blowback, as Ron Paul tells us in his perceptive essay, “

Lessons for Winning Liberty in a World of Statism

by Richard M. Ebeling January 13, 2015

Friends of freedom often become despondent when it seems that every day brings another growth and intrusion of government over people’s lives. But there is no reason to be disheartened, because there are lessons for winning liberty – from the opponents of freedom. Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, through most of the twentieth century and into ...

Free Trade: The Engine of Revolution

by Wendy McElroy January 12, 2015

To say that a country so remote and insignificant as Korea is our first line of defense is to say that every nation in every part of the world is also our “first line of defense” — a conception which is obviously fantastic and grotesque to the borders of megalomania. —Louis Bromfield, 1954 Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) may ...

The Libertarian Angle: Charlie Hebdo

by Future of Freedom Foundation January 12, 2015

Each week, FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: the attacks in France on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.

TGIF: In Memory of the Charlie Hebdo Victims

by Sheldon Richman January 9, 2015

Words can hardly convey the grief and disgust felt at Wednesday’s executions of the editor, cartoonists, and others — 10 people in all — at France’s satirical weekly magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Two policemen also were killed, and 11 other people were wounded by the three fanatics who reportedly declared they were avenging the prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam. Nothing can justify ...