Daily Articles

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 ...

The Presidential Authority to Torture and Assassinate, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2014

Part 1 | Part 2 The 9/11 attacks provided George W. Bush, the Pentagon, and the CIA with the perfect opportunity to seize extraordinary powers. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. A crisis fills much of the citizenry with great fear, and government officials have long known that in the midst of a crisis many people will eagerly trade ...

The Middle East Harvests Bitter Imperialist Fruit

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2014

The wall-to-wall coverage of the disintegration of Iraq ought to carry this credit: “This bloodshed was made possible by the generosity of British and French imperialists.” The stomach-wrenching violence in Iraq — not to mention the horrendous civil war in Syria, the chronic unrest in Palestine/Israel, and problems elsewhere in the Middle East — are direct consequences of the imperialist ...

Freedom Lost in Obama’s Secrecy-Censorship Crossfire

by James Bovard September 1, 2014

On June 2 the Supreme Court provided invaluable aid to the Obama administration’s campaign to protect Americans from evidence of federal abuses. The Court acceded to the administration’s appeal and refused to hear a free-speech case involving New York Times reporter James Risen. Risen, a courageous Pulitzer Prize winner, has been in the federal crosshairs since his 2006 book, ...

Command Posts: Roads, Railroads, and State

by Joseph R. Stromberg September 1, 2014

As any viewer of the British Channel 4 Time Team series will have noticed, almost everywhere below Hadrian’s Wall that the archaeological team digs, they have a fair chance of finding an Imperial Roman road, or a local road leading to it. The Romans were great engineers and road builders (and not just in Britain). Roman roads were all ...

Government-Rigged Markets

by George Leef September 1, 2014

Crony Capitalism in America 2008 – 2012 by Hunter Lewis (AC2 Books 2013), 399 pages. Ayn Rand called it “the aristocracy of pull.” That was her term for the political-economic system in which people can get ahead (and even become exceptionally wealthy) by virtue of their connections with those in power, rather than by their work, innovations, and ...

The Worst Government Crimes

by Anthony Gregory September 1, 2014

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (Basic Books 2010), 560 pages. We can locate the deadliest place and time in world history, certainly for the modern West, in the stretch of land between Berlin and Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s. That setting hosted an unimaginable bloodbath thanks to the worst killers ever to plague Europe — ...