Daily Articles

Obama and His “Most Evident” Right: Equality

by James Bovard April 1, 2013

In his second inaugural address, Barack Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and hailed “the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal.” Obama never explained why “created equal” was more evident than the right to liberty. He understands that he can capture far more power by invoking equality than he could by promising to ...

Why James Buchanan Matters for Those Who Love Freedom

by Steven Horwitz April 1, 2013

On January 9 the world of political economy and the community of libertarian academics lost one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers with the death of James Buchanan at age 93. Although he was not as well known as Mises and Hayek, or even Milton Friedman or perhaps Robert Nozick, his work belongs with theirs in any discussion ...

Ten Reasons the U.S. Is No Longer the Land of the Free

by Jonathan Turley April 1, 2013

While each new national-security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such ...

Macroeconomics as Coordination

by Alexander William Salter April 1, 2013

If your main source of economic information is a newspaper, television news station, or government statistical bureau, you would probably say that macroeconomics is the discipline that studies a handful of aggregate data series, such as consumption, investment, government spending, and total income, for the purpose of understanding the causal relationships among them. The reason people pay attention to ...

Book Review: All in the Family: America’s Big Brother

by Matthew Harwood April 1, 2013

Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner (New York: Random House, 2012), 560 pages. Since its humble beginnings in 1908 with a pint-sized force of 34 special agents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has always been the pillow over the face of the First Amendment. From its inception, the FBI was first and foremost an intelligence agency ...

TGIF: Loving Economics

by Sheldon Richman March 29, 2013

“My love affair with economics began in the fall of 1979.” With those words, Peter Boettke begins his valentine to the economics discipline, that is, his latest book: Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Independent Institute and Universidad Francisco Marroquin, 2012). Boettke, besides being a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, the BB&T Professor ...

Prison-Wide Hunger Strike Still Rages at Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington March 29, 2013

Three weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled, “A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo,” in which I reported the stories emerging from Guantánamo of a prison-wide hunger strike, the most severe since George W. Bush was president, and the gulf between what was being reported by the prisoners through their attorneys, and what the U.S. authorities were ...

The Streets of America Feel Different

by Wendy McElroy March 29, 2013

Zeitgeist: noun, German. The spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time. The word zeitgeist occurred to me while reading a March 22 headline in the New York Post: “Military-Style Drones Will Patrol NYC.” The report sprang from comments made by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his weekly radio ...

The Calling: Back to the Future of Freedom

by Steven Horwitz March 28, 2013

As an economist, I am always more than happy to talk about how great the market is and to undertake the task of educating people on how markets work and why they are good. Certainly, one of the central concerns of the modern libertarian movement has been to extol the virtues of the market, especially the freed market. But ...

Another Day, Another Bailout

by Tim Kelly March 28, 2013

Well, the Cypriot banking crisis has been “resolved.” It is being reported that the government in Nicosia has agreed to a deal with the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) lenders. The deal involves a large loan from the European Central Bank (ECB), the imposition of austerity measures and capital controls, and the restructuring of the country’s ...

How the News Media Betrayed Us on Iraq

by Sheldon Richman March 26, 2013

The tenth anniversary of the start of America’s illegal and aggressive war against Iraq should not pass without recalling that the mainstream news media eagerly participated in the Bush administration’s dishonest campaign for public support. It is no exaggeration to say that most news operations were little more than extensions of the White House Office of Communications. Abandoning even ...

Restrooms and a Free Society

by Laurence M. Vance March 26, 2013

We have all done it. While on a trip across the country with the family, we have all exited the Interstate and pulled into a McDonald’s or some convenience store to use the restroom — and then driven away without making a purchase. A woman in Tennessee will probably never do that again. She stopped at a restaurant in Erin, ...