Daily Articles

Senate Farce: Reining in the FBI

by James Bovard September 1, 2001

THE FOUNDING FATHERS did not create a national police force. Since Prohibition, however, federal law enforcement agencies have multiplied like mushrooms. Unfortunately, there has been no parallel growth in either curiosity or competence by the legislative branch. Charles Carroll of Maryland, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, declared that it was the task of elected representatives “to ...

Introduction to The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2001

(Excerpted from The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars, published by The Future of Freedom Foundation in 1996) America, too, had its global calling, according to the social engineers. America should not merely be a “beacon of freedom” that would be, through its allegiance to its traditional principles of individual liberty and a free, self-governing society, ...

Avoid Phony Public Service

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2001

The dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Joseph S. Nye Jr., laments that while in 1980 three-quarters of the graduates took government jobs, just one-third does so these days. That’s a good trend. But not good enough. Here’s hoping the number drops further. Many people will ask, who could ...

Sink the Sugar Boondoggle

by James Bovard September 1, 2001

The federal government has gone into the sugar-mountain business. The Agriculture Department (USDA) is paying more than a million dollars a month now to store piles of surplus sugar. USDA spent almost half a billion dollars on the sugar program last year — and federal generosity promises to make the sugar ...

The Colombia Quagmire, Part 3

by Doug Bandow September 1, 2001

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 IN SEPTEMBER BRAZIL INITIATED Operation Cobra, with some 12,000 personnel, to improve border security. “The whole world was talking about the Colombia Plan,” explained Mauro Sposito, head of the federal police effort: “We had to do something.” Local officials also worry about an influx of refugees. Brazil is concerned not only ...

Book Review: In Defense of Free Capital Markets

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2001

In Defense of Free Capital Markets: The Case against a New International Financial Architecture by David F. DeRosa (Princeton, N.J.: Bloomberg Press, 2001); 230 pages; $27.95. IN THE 1930s, during the high watermark of aggressive economic nationalism in Europe, one of the most effective political weapons of regulation used by governments was control over the buying and selling of currencies on ...

The Most Dangerous Substance of All

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2001

For all our preoccupation with ridding society of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, little thought is given to the most dangerous mind-altering substance of all: ink. Do you doubters need proof? Take Rachel Carson’s famous book, Silent Spring. In 1963 Carson wrote a book claiming that the insecticide DDT was damaging ...

Some Reflections on the Right to Bear Arms

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2001

For millions of Americans the Second Amendment and its right for the individual to bear arms appears irrelevant and practically anachronistic. It seems a throwback to those earlier days of the Wild West, when many men, far from the law and order provided by the town sheriff and circuit judge, ...

The Sham of Political Compromise

by Sheldon Richman August 2, 2001

Writing on the New York Times op-ed page recently, new Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle called for “a spirit of principled compromise.” The top Democrat presumably means compromise with the Republicans. He’s in luck. Compromise with the Senate Republicans is entirely possible — because they hold the same reactionary principles ...

Reexamining the “Good War”

by Richard M. Ebeling August 2, 2001

The Second World War is considered America’s “good war” of the 20th century. The First World War is considered the tragic war. President Woodrow Wilson intended the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” but instead it generated the rise of communism, fascism, and Nazism. The Korean War cost the ...

Liberty and the Constitution

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 2001

ONE OF THE MOST COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS in the United States is that people’s rights come from the Constitution. Without the Constitution, it is believed, people wouldn’t have such rights as freedom of expression and religion. People should be grateful to the Founding Fathers, it is said, for establishing the vehicle by which people could have such rights as life, ...

What O’Reilly Doesnt Know

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2001

Bill OReilly, populist star of the Fox News Channels OReilly Factor may be the hottest television property around, but he doesnt know beans about how markets work. The other night he charged the oil companies with conspiring to keep gasoline prices high. He quoted a 1995 Chevron memo stating that refining ...