Daily Articles

The Libertarian Angle: IRS Thievery

by Future of Freedom Foundation November 3, 2014

  FFF president Jacob Hornberger and FFF vice president Sheldon Richman discuss the hot topics of the day. This week: how the IRS steals from the citizenry. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly. Go to the podcast.

Benjamin Constant: A Principled Voice of Liberty Worth Recalling

by Richard M. Ebeling November 3, 2014

October 25th marked the 247th birthday of one of the greatest voices of liberty, the French political philosopher of freedom, Benjamin Constant. He may not be a household name to friends of freedom today, but he should be. He wrote one of the most principled and consistent defenses of individual liberty and freedom of enterprise to appear in the ...

The U.S. Executions of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2014

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 To understand the full context of the U.S. executions of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi Jr. (see part 1), it is necessary to first do a broad survey of American history. We begin with the Constitution, the document that brought the ...

Jane Cobden: Carrying On Her Father’s Good Work

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2014

Among libertarians and classical liberals, the name Richard Cobden (1804–1865) evokes admiration and applause. His activities — and successes — on behalf of freedom, free markets, and government retrenchment are legendary. Most famously, he co-founded — with John Bright — the Anti–Corn Law League, which successfully campaigned for repeal of the import tariffs on grain. Those trade restrictions had ...

Eric Holder: Patron Saint of Trigger-Happy Cops

by James Bovard November 1, 2014

Attorney General Eric Holder received a tidal wave of laudatory media coverage for his visit to Ferguson, Missouri, in the aftermath of a local white policeman’s killing an 18-year-old black man. Holder assured the people of Missouri, “Our investigation into this matter will be full, it will be fair, and it will be independent.” But Holder’s own record belies his ...

Politicians Ignore the Looming Debt Iceberg

by George Leef November 1, 2014

We libertarians are often accused of “worshiping” the Constitution, but that charge is false. Although we don’t care one bit for the “living Constitution” theory that leads only to the expansion of state power, it does not follow that we think every idea in the written Constitution is ideal. The document is flawed, as many Americans, the Anti-Federalists, argued ...

Uniting Constitutional Protection for Economic and Social Liberties, Part 1: Substantive Due Process and Unenumerated Rights

by Steven Horwitz November 1, 2014

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 We libertarians like to distinguish ourselves from our friends on the Right and Left by the fact that we care equally about both economic liberties and social/civil liberties. For libertarians the right to engage in contract and exchange with other consenting adults is just as important ...

Reining In Out-of-Control Government

by David S. D'Amato November 1, 2014

The Classical Liberal Constitution by Richard A. Epstein (Harvard University Press 2014), 701 pages. In Book II of his Two Treatises of Government, John Locke says “that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” A towering figure in the Enlightenment, Locke is often called the father of classical ...

A Libertarian Historian’s Masterpiece on the Civil War

by Anthony Gregory November 1, 2014

Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, 2nd ed. by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (Open Court 2013), 421 pages. Not many volumes advance a radically revisionist thesis while maintaining proper respect for the mainstream historical literature. To do so with a topic as exhaustively explored as the American Civil War warrants special recognition. Jeff ...

TGIF: Nothing Is More Local than the Individual

by Sheldon Richman October 31, 2014

On Tuesday the voters of the state in which I dwell, Arkansas, will be asked to vote yes or no on this: A proposed amendment to the Arkansas Constitution to provide that, effective July 1, 2015, the manufacture, sale, distribution and transportation of intoxicating liquors is lawful within the entire geographic area of each and every county of this state; ...

The Calling: How Cronyism Worsens Income Inequality (and Freed Markets Reduce It)

by Steven Horwitz October 30, 2014

I recently gave an introductory Public Choice talk sponsored by Students for Liberty at the University of Ottawa. The next speaker was my friend Anne Rathbone Bradley, who was Skyping in from Washington. Anne gave a terrific talk about cronyism and rent-seeking that nicely complemented many of the points I’d made. But one of the side issues she raised ...

How Profit Benefits the Public

by Richard Parsons October 30, 2014

Portuguese I’ve heard, like you have, about corporate greed. The profit motive, we are told, is evil and causes the little people to be trampled. Formal studies show that people perceive that profit is negatively associated with social value for specific companies and whole industries (example — that “evil” oil industry). This is probably no surprise, ...