Daily Articles

Peace Prize-Winner Obama Savages Somalia

by Sheldon Richman September 20, 2011

A human catastrophe is taking place in Somalia, the result of drought, famine — and the savage war conducted by the Obama administration, complete with a CIA training facility and prison. According to the Guardian, 150,000 desperate Somalis, mostly women and children, have walked more than 60 miles to a crowded refugee camp in Kenya in the past three ...

Dying to Corrupt Afghanistan

by James Bovard September 19, 2011

American soldiers are dying so that Afghan politicians can continue looting U.S. tax dollars. Foreign aid has long been notorious for creating kleptocracies governments of thieves. The $50+ billion foreign aid that the United States has dumped on Afghanistan over the past decade is a textbook case of how foreign handouts drag a nation down. Corruption has been a huge ...

9/11 and the Cost of Empire

by Tim Kelly September 19, 2011

According to the American media and politicians commemorating the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were a diabolical surprise attack perpetrated by Islamist terrorists against a peaceful and unsuspecting country. While many of the victims of those attacks were no doubt peaceful and unsuspecting, the same cannot be said of the ...

The Road to the Permanent Warfare State, Part 5

by Gregory Bresiger September 17, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 |Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 |Part 12 |Part 13 I deplore the hysterical sort of anti-Communism which, it seems to me, is gaining ...

After Ten Years of the War on Terror, Its Time to Scrap the Authorization for Use of Military Force

by Andy Worthington September 16, 2011

Many Americans probably think that the “War on Terror” began on September 11, 2001, when the terrible terrorist attacks took place, whose tenth anniversary has recently been marked. However, the “War on Terror” actually began on September 14, 2001, when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which authorized the president “to use all necessary and ...

Rube Goldberg Economics

by Rich Schwartzman September 16, 2011

“Since ‘economic growth’ is today’s great problem, and our present Administration is promising to ‘stimulate’ it — to achieve general prosperity by ever wider government controls, while spending an unproduced wealth ...” Any contemporary libertarian or Austrian-school economist could have written those words. The quotation, however, is from Ayn Rand’s opening paragraph to the essay “Let Us Alone,” published in ...

Stimulus II Won’t Work, Either

by Sheldon Richman September 16, 2011

President Obama won’t use the “stimulus” label to describe his nearly half-trillion-dollar jobs bill, but that refusal can’t hide the fact that he has no idea how economies recover from recessions. “Stimulus” is a tainted label because his $800 billion bill in 2009 was a failure. His economic team promised that passing that bill would keep unemployment from exceeding ...

Endless Evil: The Drug Wars Continuing Collateral Damage, Part 2

by Radley Balko September 15, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 “The Fourth Amendment has been virtually repealed by court decisions,” Yale law professor Steven Duke told Wired magazine in 2000, “most of which involve drug searches.” The rise of no-knock raids and SWAT teams is one example (discussed in part one of this series), but there are others. James Bovard once wrote, for example, of the almost comically ...

Give Me Doubleplusgood or Give Me Death!

by Wendy McElroy September 15, 2011

George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, got a few things wrong — for example, the date. But he was dead-on in depicting the cause-and-effect relationship between language and politics, between language and our ability to think clearly; the process of using words as social control was called Newspeak. What cannot be expressed cannot be effectively understood or opposed. Neutralizing language ...

The Jacob Hornberger Show: September 10, 2011 (video)

by Jacob G. Hornberger September 13, 2011

The Jacob Hornberger Show broadcasts live Saturday nights at 7pm EST. Visit FFF's Ustream Channel to watch the show live.

Antitrust Is Central Planning

by Laurence M. Vance September 13, 2011

Child safety, national security, national defense, counterterrorism, and consumer protection — by invoking one of these terms, the federal government can do almost anything and the public will not just go along with it, but accept it as good and necessary. Under the guise of consumer protection, the U.S. government is seeking to block the merger of two companies — ...

Trumping Protectionism

by Robert Murphy September 12, 2011

Although he’s no longer a contender for the 2012 Republican nomination, Donald Trump’s short-lived proto-campaign was notable for its extreme China-bashing. Because such mercantilist and xenophobic sentiments may get only worse as the economy slumps along, it’s worthwhile to point out exactly why Trump’s proclamations made little sense and in fact were internally contradictory. At the height of his popularity ...