Daily Articles

Is the Foreign-Policy Elite Clueless?

by Sheldon Richman September 17, 2014

The American foreign-policy elite seems to have no idea what it’s doing. Americans may believe the government — especially the foreign-policy side — is at least minimally competent, but when one surveys decisions from the last few decades, one has to wonder. The current crop of policymakers, like earlier ones, know what they want to do: make the world safe for ...

The Miracle and Morality of the Market

by Richard M. Ebeling September 16, 2014

One of the great fallacies arrogantly believed in by those in political power is the notion that they can know enough to manage and command the lives of everyone in society with better results than if people are left to live their own lives as they freely choose. The fact is, there is far more in the world that successfully ...

The Libertarian Angle: The Causes of Wealth in a Society

by Future of Freedom Foundation September 15, 2014

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: the economic conditions that create wealth. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.

TGIF: Ownership and Ideas

by Sheldon Richman September 12, 2014

Like many libertarians, I’ve learned a lot from Murray Rothbard on a wide variety of subjects. Of course, no one gets everything right, especially someone as intellectually ambitious, multidisciplinary, and prolific as Rothbard. Nevertheless, reading the work of the man who left such a mark on the modern libertarian movement is as profitable as it is pleasurable. While rereading

What the New York Times Neglected to Say about Marijuana Legalization

by Laurence M. Vance September 12, 2014

The editorial board of the New York Times recently called for the legalization of marijuana in a seven-part series titled “High Time: An Editorial Series on Marijuana Legalization.” Although the New York Times raised many good points in favor of marijuana legalization, the newspaper’s editors neglected to say something they should have about the subject. In its introduction, ...

Obama Follows Bush’s Iraq Playbook

by Sheldon Richman September 10, 2014

U.S. politicians are exploiting the gruesome beheadings of two American journalists to whip up war fever against ISIS, the “criminal gang” masquerading as an organization of devout Sunni Muslims that controls large parts of Syria and Iraq. The American propaganda campaign seems to be working if recent polls are accurate. No decent person is anything ...

Proud to be an American: What Should It Mean?

by Richard M. Ebeling September 9, 2014

America! For more than two hundred years the word has represented hope, opportunity, a second chance, and freedom. In America the accident of a man’s birth did not serve as an inescapable weight that dictated a person’s fate or that of his family. The individual owned his own life and was free to shape it as his own mind ...

The Libertarian Angle: Highway Robbery and the Drug War

by Future of Freedom Foundation September 8, 2014

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: Highway Robbery and the Drug War. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.

TGIF: Does Freedom Require Empire?

by Sheldon Richman September 5, 2014

In a startling article, Daniel McCarthy, the admirable editor of The American Conservative magazine (TAC), writes, “Successive British and American empires created and upheld the world order in which liberalism could flourish.” In other words, as he writes in “Why Liberalism Means Empire,” “Liberalism and ...

Let’s Have Candor from the NATO Summit

by Sheldon Richman September 4, 2014

Don’t hold your breath, but it would be refreshing if NATO leaders meeting in Wales this week spoke candidly for once about Ukraine. They could start by embracing this observation by John Mearsheimer, the distinguished foreign-policy scholar at the University of Chicago: According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on ...

The Libertarian Angle: Labor Day

by Future of Freedom Foundation September 2, 2014

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: Labor Day. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.

Don’t Believe Government about Price Inflation

by Richard M. Ebeling September 2, 2014

It is an old adage that there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics. Nowhere is this truer that in the government’s monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) that tracks the prices for a selected “basket” of goods to determine changes in people’s cost-of-living and, therefore, the degree of price inflation in the American economy. On August 19th, the ...