Daily Articles

The Case for Unilateral Free Trade and Open Immigration

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 1994

The American people are extremely fortunate. Two hundred years ago, their Founding Fathers used the Constitution to prohibit American government officials from ever enacting trade and immigration restrictions between the respective states of the Union. This meant that the citizens of any state could buy and sell goods and services with the citizens of any other state, without tariffs ...

The Future of Freedom-Retrospect and Prospects, Part 1

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1994

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 With the approaching end of 1994, The Future of Freedom Foundation is celebrating its fifth anniversary. For a half-decade, Jacob Hornberger and I, and the other authors who have contributed essays for Freedom Daily, have attempted to make the ethical and economic case for individual liberty and the ...

Separating Money and the State, Part 2: Revoking Government’s Money Monopoly

by Douglas E. French November 1, 1994

Part 1 | Part 2 Every city in America has dozens of fast-food restaurants vying for our business. Which are successful? The ones that deliver on their promise to provide consistently good, quality food. Restaurants that do not, go out of business. If government controlled the fast-food business the same way ...

Private Ownership and the Environment

by Lawrence W. Reed November 1, 1994

When it comes to "environmentalism," it is presumed by many that government is the only game in town. At least that is the message of radical environmentalists, who see private enterprise as the villain and the public sector as the white knight. That perspective is being challenged by a growing number of scientists and public scholars advancing what is known ...

Book Review: Separating School and State

by Ray Olson November 1, 1994

Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families by Sheldon Richman (Fairfax, Virginia: The Future of Freedom Foundation, 1994); 128 pages; $22.95 hardcover; $14.95 softcover. Yes, that's School & State in the title, not Church & State . Richman pulled his oldest child out of public school and has since seen to all his children's home schooling, or, ...

Individualism and the Free Society, Part 1

by Nathaniel Branden November 1, 1994

Part 1 | Part 2 A political system is the expression of a code of ethics. Just as some form of statism or collectivism is the expression of the ethics of altruism, so individualism — as represented by laissez-faire capitalism — is the expression of the ethics of rational self-interest. In this chapter I propose to show why this is ...

Book Review: Lost Rights

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1994

Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberties by James Bovard (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994); 408 pages; $24.95. Several years ago, Chicago School economist George Stigler argued: Even with the vast expansion of public controls over earning and spending in the United States since the Civil War, there has been an enormous expansion in the average individual's liberty. He has ...

Clinton, Castro, and Cuba

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 1994

August 19, 1994, will go down as a black day in the history of the United States. On that day, President William Jefferson Clinton began jailing Cuban refugees in an American concentration center on the American side of Cuba. It was the first time since the Cuban revolution in 1959 that ...

The Greying of the Conservative Idea: Freedom and the Social Order

by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 1994

Ours is a time without a consistent ideological or philosophical direction. The utopian dreams that dominated more than three-quarters of our century have lost their attractiveness for most people, after the attempt to implement them produced nothing but death camps, slave labor, and mass terror. Fascism, National Socialism, and ...

The Forgotten Argument for Free Trade

by Samuel Bostaph October 1, 1994

Like most public policy debates in the United States of the Bush-Clinton era, the debates preceding congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) consisted mostly of extensive public wrangling over who might gain and who might lose if NAFTA passed. Self-proclaimed champions for various special-interest groups debated the job-creating versus job-destroying potential of the agreement, the implications ...

The United States: A Protectionist Nation

by James Bovard October 1, 1994

In talking about trade, many politicians rely on the Big Lie — the simple assertion that America is the most open market in the world, and, therefore, that any criticisms of our existing trade policies for being protectionist are absurd. But sifting through the details of trade policy can provide insight — and entertainment. One of the best ways ...

Separating Money and the State, Part 1: Eighty Years of Destruction

by Douglas E. French October 1, 1994

Part 1 | Part 2 On December 23, 1993, the Federal Reserve System marked its 80th birthday. But few were celebrating. The Federal Reserve Act, which was signed into law in 1913 by President Woodrow Wilson, is described by economist Hans Sennholz as "probably the most tragic blunder ever committed by ...