A Balanced Budget Is Not Enough by Sheldon Richman January 24, 2005 Conservatives must be easy to please. Case in point: The other day columnist Lawrence Kudlow excitedly let us in on the well-kept secret that the federal budget deficit is getting smaller. “Last week’s Treasury report on U.S. finances for December shows a year-to-date fiscal 2005 deficit already $11 ...
Will Bush Side with the Property Thieves? by Sheldon Richman January 19, 2005 Susette Kelo’s story is becoming tragically familiar. She and her neighbors are at risk of losing their homes and businesses because the local government has conspired with a corporation to condemn their land under the power of eminent domain. This is happening in New London, Connecticut, the latest ...
Let’s Look within Ourselves for Iraq’s WMD by Jacob G. Hornberger January 17, 2005 Last Wednesday, some two months after the U.S. presidential election, U.S. officials formally ended their two-year search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Perhaps this will finally put an end to the hopes of many supporters of the Iraq War that a modern, air-conditioned facility would be ...
The Tax Path Away from Liberty by George Amberg January 15, 2005 The path away from liberty is paved with bad taxes, and we trip over them, frequently. The liberty Americans had in 1900 has been seriously eroded by a taking of our earnings that continually increases. Back then, little of that was done. Read the following ...
Augusto Pinochet and the Conservative Threat to America by Jacob G. Hornberger January 12, 2005 While some people might believe that those on the Left wing of the political spectrum pose the bigger threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people, nothing could be further from the truth. Today, the much bigger threat (Readhere and here) comes instead from the Right wing or conservative side ...
Liberate Us from the Educators by Scott McPherson January 10, 2005 The state’s monopoly on education is perhaps the worst thing that has ever happened to children in America. From the earliest days of the republic, education was provided by parents, churches, and local communities. The first proposals for state-supported schools were merely calls to address an absence of ...
Tsunami Aid: Not Theirs to Give by Sheldon Richman January 7, 2005 The devastating earthquake-induced tidal waves in Asia are the latest reminders that Mother Nature can be a mass killer. It’s worth contemplating that the societies that interfere most with nature — the rich, market-oriented industrial societies — are the least vulnerable to her ravages. That’s not what the environmentalists ...
Why Trust in Social Security? by Jacob G. Hornberger January 3, 2005 Isn’t a central argument among those who argue for the continuation of America’s premier socialist program, Social Security, that Americans cannot be trusted to voluntarily take care of the needs of their elderly parents? Let’s set aside all the nonsense about “I put it in and therefore I have a right to ...
The Bill of Rights: Trial by Jury by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2005 The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads in part as follows: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.... Trial by jury is one of the essential prerequisites of a free society. As our ...
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism by Charles K. Rowley January 1, 2005 This paper was presented at The Future of Freedom Foundations five-year anniversary conference in 1994. Introduction The momentous upheaval in Eastern Europe in 1989, followed by the complete disintegration of the USSR, did not usher in the end of history as claimed by overly-enthusiastic Western commentators such as Fukuyama (1992) in the first wave of euphoria over the collapse of Marxist-Leninist ...
Bureaucracy: A Mises Classic, Part 1 by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2005 Part 1 | Part 2 Ludwig von Mises, the great expositor of the Austrian school of economics, left an awesome, even intimidating, body of work. Human Action and Socialism are among the most important books written in economic and social theory, yet most people with little spare time will probably not try to tackle them. Mises’s shorter works ...
Bush’s Presidential-Papers Power Grab by James Bovard January 1, 2005 On November 1, 2001, President Bush issued an executive order entitled “Further Implementation of the Presidential Records Act.” His order effectively overturned an act of Congress and a Supreme Court decision and could make it far more difficult for Americans to learn of government abuses. Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University ...