Daily Articles

Olive Schreiner, Born Branded and Too Soon

by Wendy McElroy April 21, 2012

Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (March 24, 1855 – December 11, 1920) lived with rare courage in a world where women were born into acquiescence. As the daughter of British missionaries to South Africa, she was also born into Empire, the Victorian Era, and racism. At the age of 18, Schreiner spoke with a native black woman who made an ...

Obamacare and Unlimited Government

by Tim Kelly April 20, 2012

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” has undergone oral arguments before the Supreme Court, and its constitutionality is now being pondered by the nine justices. The court’s decision is due out sometime in June. While the 2010 health-care law is atrocious public policy and clearly an unconstitutional power grab by the federal government, there is no guarantee ...

Open Societies and Spontaneous Orders

by Richard M. Ebeling April 20, 2012

Popper, Hayek and the Open Society by Calvin Hayes (London/New York: Routledge, 2009); 284 pages. Friedrich A. Hayek and Karl Popper were two of the most influential and internationally recognized critics of totalitarian collectivism in the 20th century. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) and Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) helped change the intellectual climate at a time when ...

Supremacy of the Tenth

by Rich Schwartzman April 19, 2012

There’s been a small debate going on in the Pennsylvania legislature, one that should be larger, louder, and receiving much more publicity. It’s a debate between proponents of the Tenth Amendment and advocates of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. At issue is a proposed amendment to resolution H.R. 49. The resolution claims that the state has sovereignty under the ...

The Torture Trials at Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington April 19, 2012

In the last few weeks, Guantánamo has been under the spotlight as, for the first time since Barack Obama took office, the military-commission trial system — the government’s preferred method for trying terror suspects held in Guantánamo — has been readied for trying “high-value detainees,” i.e., those who, as well as being held in Guantánamo, were previously

The Regulatory State Gone Wild

by Laurence M. Vance April 18, 2012

According to a new Heritage Foundation report, “Red Tape Rising: Obama-Era Regulation at the Three-Year Mark,” during the first three years of the Obama administration “a total of 106 new major regulations have been imposed at a cost of more than $46 billion annually, and nearly $11 billion in one-time implementation costs.” All told, some 10,215 new federal ...

Barack Obama: Corporatist

by Sheldon Richman April 17, 2012

Last November, President Obama stood before an audience and said government needs to be “responsive to the needs of people, not the needs of special interests.” He added, “That is probably the biggest piece of business that remains unfinished.” He made these remarks, the New York Times reports, before a $17,900-a-plate fundraising dinner at the home of Dwight and ...

Guantánamo and Recidivism: New Report Debunks the Government’s Inflated Claims

by Andy Worthington April 11, 2012

On Monday, April 9, the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey released a new report, “National Security Deserves Better: ‘Odd’ Recidivism Numbers Undermine the Guantánamo Policy Debate” (PDF). It analyzes the fundamental problems with the claims made by the Pentagon and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) regarding ...

The Murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 11, 2012

In early 1976 the National Enquirer published a story that shocked the elite political class in Washington, D.C. The story disclosed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a divorced spouse of a high CIA official named Cord Meyer, had been engaged in a two-year sexual affair with President John F. Kennedy. By the time the article ...

Budgeting Leviathan

by Laurence M. Vance April 10, 2012

The U.S. government is the largest and most powerful government in the history of the world. But that stature comes with a price. Not only has the American government confiscated untold trillions of dollars in wealth from its citizens; it has borrowed trillions more and accumulated the greatest mountain of debt in human history. The federal leviathan has an ...

A War on Us

by Rich Schwartzman April 9, 2012

Libertarians come to the libertarian movement for a variety of reasons. Some people get involved because of a single issue such as the drug war, or assaults on the Second Amendment, or the confiscatory tax code and intrusion of the IRS (likely the most feared agency in the country’s arsenal of control over its citizens). Some of us have a ...

El Mal del Estado de la Seguridad Nacional, Parte 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 9, 2012

The following is a Spanish translation of “The Evil of the National Security State” by Jacob G. Hornberger. The translation was done for FFF on a complimentary basis by a FFF supporter in Spain. Please share it with your Spanish-speaking friends.   Parte 1 | Parte 2 | Parte 3 | Parte 4 |  Parte ...