Daily Articles

Boxer’s Confusion about Ownership

by Tibor R. Machan May 4, 2007

California Senator Barbara Boxer sent around a letter to the editor that was published in The OC Register on April 30th, hoping to clarify my California Wild Heritage Act. She states in this letter that the approximately 2.3 million acres included in the bill are all publicly owned lands. Not one acre of private land is included in the ...

Bush War Policy Comes Crashing Down

by Sheldon Richman May 4, 2007

It’s been a rough several weeks for President Bush and the war party. Observe some recent headlines: “Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy” — The McClatchy Newspaper story pointed out, “Military planners have abandoned the idea that training Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start ...

Empire or Freedom?

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2007

The 9/11 attacks brought to the surface a dilemma that everyone, especially libertarians, must now confront: whether to choose a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy or a free society. No one can deny that we now live in a country in which the president, on his own initiative, has the omnipotent power to send the nation into war against any country ...

New Deal, Old Deal

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 2007

It’s commonly held that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a radical break with America’s past. Both fans and foes of Roosevelt embrace this position. Many libertarians join conservatives in believing that things were going satisfactorily in the United States until Roosevelt got his hands on power. Some take a slightly ...

What Do Citizens Owe Government?

by James Bovard May 1, 2007

When politicians are not promising new benefits to citizens, they continually remind citizens what they owe the government. From their first years in government schools, children are indoctrinated with the notion that government provides them some grandiose benefit. This seed often produces a harvest of servility in later life. But few people stop and ...

That Horrible Income Gap

by George Leef May 1, 2007

Karl Marx’s biggest selling point has always been his argument that workers are systematically underpaid under capitalism. They produce value and greedy capitalist owners cheat them out of it. Good economists have understood for centuries that in a free (and therefore competitive) labor market, it isn’t possible to underpay anyone for long. That fact, however, ...

What the Warfare State Really Costs

by Thomas E. Woods Jr. May 1, 2007

Estimates of the cost of the Iraq war continue to escalate to levels well beyond what its optimistic architects once promised. Most notable, perhaps, has been the estimate of Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz, who, in a January 2006 paper with Harvard’s Linda Bilmes, put the full cost at around $2 trillion. ...

The Nanny State’s Road to Serfdom

by Jeffrey A. Singer May 1, 2007

A reader wrote me about my article “The Slippery Slope of Nanny-State Politics,” which appeared in the last issue of Freedom Daily. The article derided the rise of the “nanny state” and its threat to our way of life as a free people. I had written that New York ...

Sophie Scholl: A Life of Moral Courage

by Wendy McElroy May 1, 2007

The 2005 German film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Die letzten Tage) depicts the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Magdalena Scholl (May 9, 1921 February 22, 1943). Sophie and her brother, Hans, were leading members of a nonviolent resistance group called the White Rose. Five students in their early twenties formed the group in 1942 at the University of Munich. The ...

The Sham of the Padilla Trial

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 30, 2007

Jury selection in the Jose Padilla case is now under way in federal district court in Miami, but the trial is nothing more than a sham. Why? Because no matter how the jury rules, Padilla is almost certain to remain incarcerated for a long time. If Padilla is convicted by the jury, the judge ...

Why Markets Are Dreaded

by Tibor R. Machan April 27, 2007

In one of those vapid, in-house disputes often published in The New York Review of Books’s letters-to-the-editor sections, we can read about a disagreement among educational experts under the heading “Scandals in Higher Education: An Exchange” (4/26/07). Well, not much of a disagreement because none of the participants gives ...

Single-Day Registrations Now Available

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 27, 2007

Because we have received many requests for daily registrations for our June 1-4 conference Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties, we have decided to open up the conference to per-day registrations. The new per-day registration fees will be as follows: Friday, June 1: $195 Saturday, June ...