Daily Articles

Egypt’s Lessons for Americans, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 The military coup in Egypt last summer holds some valuable lessons for Americans, especially with respect to such things as freedom, democracy, and the U.S. national-security state, which has been an important part of American life since the end of World War II. The coup provides an especially important lesson with respect ...

Is Edward Snowden a Lawbreaker?

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 2013

Most people believe that Edward Snowden, who has confirmed that the U.S. government spies on us, broke the law. Even many of his defenders concede this. While in one sense the statement “Snowden broke the law” may be trivially true, in another, deeper sense it is untrue. He may have violated the terms of legislation passed by Congress and signed ...

Voting Rights as Bogus Panaceas

by James Bovard October 1, 2013

The Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last June. “Liberals” were horrified and reacted as if the Civil War had been fought in vain. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg denounced the decision for its “hubris,” Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) condemned it as a “dagger” stab at civil rights, and Attorney General Eric Holder ...

Gabriel Kolko Revisited, Part 2: Kolko Abroad

by Joseph R. Stromberg October 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 Gabriel Kolko’s historical writing hinges on the interrelations of economic, political, and ideological power in American history. His later work increasingly focused on those phenomena in relation to war, peace, and empire. As his project went forward, Kolko increasingly departed from that Marxist framework in which state power becomes so utterly subordinate ...

Digging Out

by Richard W. Fulmer October 1, 2013

Pundits are full of advice about how and how not to pull the country out of its financial morass. Rebuild infrastructure or cut spending, increase deficit spending or reduce the debt, raise or lower taxes, regulate or deregulate, implement a new industrial policy or get government out of the economy, open the monetary floodgates or end the Fed’s easy-money ...

Revisiting Vietnam

by Laurence M. Vance October 1, 2013

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse (Metropolitan Books, 2013), 386 pages. The Vietnam War polarized Americans in the 20th century like no other event, dividing the people as no war had since the so-called Civil War a century earlier. Even though Vietnam was thousands of miles away, had not attacked the United ...

The Welfare State Exposed

by George Leef October 1, 2013

After the Welfare State, edited by Tom G. Palmer (Jameson Books, 2012), 180 pages Most Americans (indeed, most people in every advanced nation) walk around in a fog of myths and misconceptions concerning the subject of this book — the welfare state. They believe that in the absence of governmental welfare programs, there would be little or no support ...

The Libertarian Angle: Shutdown Antics

by Future of Freedom Foundation September 30, 2013

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss the impending government shut down. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

The Calling: Are Libertarians Individualists?

by Steven Horwitz September 27, 2013

A young libertarian recently told me that, as an individualist, he thinks it strange that people identify with a religious or ethnic group as “part of their roots or culture.” For this young man, individualism apparently means rejecting all sorts of possible (voluntary) connections to others that might suggest that group identity is equal to, or even more important ...

TGIF: Lysander Spooner on the National Debt

by Sheldon Richman September 27, 2013

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew says if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling — or, as I call it, the debt sky, because apparently the sky is the limit — the government won’t be able to pay all its bills starting October 17. The Congressional Budget Office says that dire condition won’t set in until sometime ...

The Kenyan Massacre’s Roots in America’s Somalia Policy

by Sheldon Richman September 24, 2013

Last weekend’s hostage-taking — and the murder of at least 61 people — at the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, has its roots in the U.S. government’s intervention in Somalia, which began in the 1990s. Although there is no justification for killing innocents, it is fair to point out that al-Shabaab, the Islamist group that committed the attack ...

Free Banking and the Economics of a Free Society (video)

by George Selgin September 20, 2013

On September 19, 2013, George Selgin gave the following speech at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s Economic Liberty Lecture Series. The speech can viewed above in its entirety.