Daily Articles

U.S. Foreign Policy Is a Shambles

by Sheldon Richman January 7, 2014

With al-Qaeda affiliates wreaking havoc in Iraq, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham seem to lament that no U.S. troops are on the scene to get in on the action. “The Administration must recognize the failure of its policies in the Middle East and change course,” McCain and Graham said. Change course? Do they want to send troops back ...

The Libertarian Angle: The Failure of Foreign Interventionism

by Future of Freedom Foundation January 6, 2014

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss U.S. foreign policy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

TGIF: Dump the Contraception Mandate and All the Rest

by Sheldon Richman January 3, 2014

“Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.” —Oscar Wilde In the wacky world of American politics, if you as an employer have a religious objection to paying for your employees’ contraceptives, you are the one contemptuous of religious freedom. As the New York Times editorial board lectured a judge who thinks otherwise, “the threat to religious liberty comes ...

Biting the Cultural Imperialism that Feeds You

by Wendy McElroy January 3, 2014

On November 21, the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) was introduced in Congress for the fourth time since 2007. I-VAWA seeks to embed the prevention of gender violence and the empowerment of women and girls into American foreign policy. In 2010, while serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton declared such global empowerment to be a “central ...

Let’s Make 2014 the Year of Freedom for Low-Wage Workers

by Sheldon Richman January 2, 2014

The federal budget deficit was big in 2013, but not as big as the freedom deficit. We should all resolve to make 2014 the year that we secure our freedom from government, the biggest threat we face. We can start with freedom for low-wage workers. Hundreds of occupations are closed shut unless one has a license. To get the license, one ...

Two Brothers in Search of Monsters to Destroy

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2014

In celebration of the Fourth of July, 1821, John Quincy Adams delivered a speech before Congress that is famously titled, “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.” Adams used the occasion to describe the foreign policy of the United States: Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her ...

Lysander Spooner on the National Debt

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2014

Once again, last autumn we were inundated with dire warnings about what would befall the American people and the world economy if Congress did not raise the debt ceiling — or, as I call it, the debt sky, because apparently the sky’s the limit. As he has each time this issue has come up, Barack Obama emphasized that increasing the ...

Common Sense versus Obama’s Next War

by James Bovard January 1, 2014

The Obama administration tottered on the edge of launching a cruise missile attack on Syria this past August and September. Obama hesitated and decided to seek congressional approval before blowing up many targets on the Syrian landscape. After Americans made it loud and clear that they did not want another war, congressional opposition helped curb his bellicosity. But he ...

Contested Ground: The Semantics of “Laissez Faire”

by Joseph R. Stromberg January 1, 2014

One frequently runs across accounts of the modern world which hold that laissez faire (or some ideally free market) never existed but yet was (or is) somehow responsible for most ills that have faced mankind for several centuries. The writers seem to have it both ways. How, you might well ask, can that be done? Rather easily, it seems. On ...

Exit over Voice

by Alexander William Salter January 1, 2014

By what standard should we judge collective decision-making? In the liberal-democratic tradition, the overwhelming consensus affirms the supremacy of process. On this view, the justness and efficacy of collective decision-making depend on the inclusiveness of the process. That concern, what philosophers and social scientists call “voice,” has manifested itself in many familiar and important ways, chiefly through an expansion ...

The Classical Liberal legacy of Percy Bysshe Shelley

by Wendy McElroy January 1, 2014

“I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey across the great sandy desert of Politics.” In this manner, the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) announced a political treatise entitled A Philosophical View of Reform (1819). It states, “The first principle of political reform is the natural equality of men, not with relation to their property ...

The Great Writ

by David S. D'Amato January 1, 2014

The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror by Anthony Gregory (Independent Institute/Cambridge University Press 2013), 390 pages. Among libertarians generally, there is a somewhat dependable tendency to hark back to the halcyon days of a supposed free age somewhere in the past, and to spotlight certain related features of Anglo-American ...