Daily Articles

Britain’s Gun-Control Folly

by Scott McPherson December 16, 2005

A former Texas police officer is causing a stir in jolly Old England. After leaving his job in Garland, Texas, and moving with his British wife and their three children to Reading, Ben Johnson took a job as a British bobby — and had the audacity to suggest that he might ...

Cindy Sheehan’s War

by Samuel Bostaph December 14, 2005

Not One More Mother’s Child, by Cindy Sheehan (Koa Books, 2005); 204 pages; $15.00. On August 3, 2005, a former youth minister in Vacaville, California, was at home watching a television report of the deaths of 14 more U.S. Marines in Iraq. Her eldest son, whom she deeply loved, had been killed ...

The Emperor Has Spoken

by Sheldon Richman December 12, 2005

It’s a measure of the imperial nature of the modern American presidency that George W. Bush misstates the truth even as he defends himself against the charge that he misstates the truth. It takes extraordinary disrespect for the American people to look them in the eyes and say that Congress had ...

Environmentalist Terrorists Burn with Hypocrisy

by Scott McPherson December 9, 2005

Early in the morning of November 21, four unoccupied townhouses in Hagerstown, Maryland, were intentionally set on fire, causing approximately $300,000 in damage. An anonymous email to news organizations claimed the attack for the “Earth Liberation Front” (ELF) — to “defend what remains of the wild and the ...

We Can Prevail

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 5, 2005

Dear Friend of FFF: Sometimes people say that the situation in America is so far gone that there is no way that we can turn things around and restore individual liberty, free markets, and a constitutional republic to our land. It is time to close up shop, they suggest, and just resign ourselves to omnipotent federal control over our lives ...

The Social Benefits of Making Money

by Sheldon Richman December 2, 2005

The critics of the free market ought to listen to themselves once in a while. They might learn something. A standard charge against market-oriented societies is that they are corrupted by profit. Businessmen only want to make money. Profits come before people. At the same time, the market’s critics blame ...

The Separation of Charity and State

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2005

The primary function of the federal government these days is to help out others with federal welfare assistance. The assistance is dispensed in a variety of ways — directly, in the form of a money payment (Social Security); indirectly, by helping people with payments to third parties (Medicare and Medicaid); subsidies to government entities and private organizations (grants to ...

Abolish the Army Corps — And More

by Sheldon Richman December 1, 2005

Hurricane Katrina is the latest evidence that the Army Corps of Engineers should be abolished. It shouldn’t merely be reformed or “privatized.” Its duties shouldn’t be redistributed among other agencies. Just abolished. In its place, if government gets out of the way, will emerge a decentralized industry that will do the ...

Hoover’s Second Wrecking of American Agriculture

by James Bovard December 1, 2005

My last Freedom Daily article traced how the federal government wrecked the agricultural sector after World War I and how the Agriculture Department became a permanent lobby for “socialism in one industry.” But President Calvin Coolidge steadfastly resisted the push to have the feds take over crop pricing. Unfortunately, his successor ...

Crippling Competition, Part 1

by Scott McPherson December 1, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2 Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence. — Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead Just about anyone who ...

Minimum Wage, Maximum Intervention, Part 2

by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2 All arguments for the minimum wage come down to this: since no family can survive on an income lower than the minimum wage, it is the job of government to mandate a minimum wage to keep people out of poverty. No matter how elaborate the argument, this is the bottom line. Even if ...

Economics for the Citizen, Part 10

by Walter E. Williams December 1, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 In 10 short articles, there’s no way to even scratch the surface of economic knowledge. I’ll simply end the series with a ...