Daily Articles

The Birth Pangs of Rosemary’s Baby

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 2, 2006

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice employed an interesting metaphor to describe the death and mayhem in Lebanon. She said that the world was witnessing the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Why is that an interesting metaphor? Well, she’s obviously referring to a pregnant woman’s labor pains and the ...

The Federal War on Gold, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Given the rising price of gold and the fact that federal spending is totally out of control, the prospect of gold confiscation and criminalizing the private ownership of gold by federal authorities inevitably rears its ugly head. There are few things that federal big spenders hate more than gold. ...

Beware Income-Tax Casuistry, Part 1

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 For many opponents of the income tax the name Brushaber is magical. It comes from Frank R. Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., the 1916 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the 1913 income-tax law passed under the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That income-tax opponents would ...

Lies and Leviathan

by James Bovard August 1, 2006

Big government requires big lies and not just on wars but across the board. The more powerful government becomes, the more abuses it commits and the more lies it must tell. Interventions beget debacles that require cover-ups and denials. The more the government screws up, the more evidence the government is obliged to bury or deny. The government becomes ...

The New Deal and Roosevelt’s Seizure of Gold: A Legacy of Theft and Inflation, Part 1

by William L. Anderson August 1, 2006

Part 1 | Part 2 In a recent discussion on the economy with a faculty colleague, I reminded her of some of the absurdities of New Deal economic policies (many of which have been laid out in previous issues of Freedom Daily and elsewhere). She reminded me that Franklin D. Roosevelt is a “hero” to her and ...

Economic Freedom and the Peasant Uprising of 1381

by Scott McPherson August 1, 2006

There’s no bread, let them eat cake There’s no end to what they’ll take Flaunt the fruits of noble birth Wash the salt into the earth. — “Bastille Day,” by Rush Beginning roughly from the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, feudalism took hold of England and replaced the Saxon institutions that had defined that land for six centuries. Under this ...

Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880)

by Wendy McElroy August 1, 2006

In 1853, Lucretia Mott described the Quaker women of the Massachusetts community into which she had been born. “Look at the heads of those women; they can mingle with men; they are not triflers; they have intelligent subjects of conversation.” Quakers believed that all people were equal before God and, so, every human being’s autonomy deserved equal respect. They ...

Piercing through Myths, Lies, and Stupidity

by George Leef August 1, 2006

Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel (Hyperion 2006); 304 pages; $24.95. John Stossel, anchor of the ABC News program 20/20, is a rarity among the ranks of American media personalities. He’s a skeptic when it comes to everything except freedom. He even calls himself a libertarian. Over the years, ...

Conservatives and Immigration Control

by Bart Frazier July 31, 2006

To most people, the idea of open borders seems like a radical idea. And of the people most vehemently opposed to it these days, conservatives top the list. But if a run-of-the-mill conservative were to take the philosophical underpinnings of his politics into account, he would find that he too ...

The Moral Rot of Middle East Intervention

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 28, 2006

Of one thing we can be certain after decades of the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East: it has not brought peace to that part of the world. Another thing we can be certain of: the federal government’s interventionist foreign policy is at the center of the ...

Not World War III

by Sheldon Richman July 26, 2006

When a war breaks out somewhere, two sound principles for civilized people are: (1) demand an immediate ceasefire and, failing that, (2) keep the war contained — do not broaden it, do not join in. We can gauge the civility of the Bush administration’s neoconservative boosters by the fact that they ...

Bush Countenances Middle East Violence

by Sheldon Richman July 21, 2006

The administration of George W. Bush has done some contemptible things in its five and a half years, but what it’s doing now in the Middle East could be a new low. Innocent civilians are dying in Lebanon and Israel, but the administration’s position is that the time is ...