Daily Articles

The Lesson of a Crash that Cured Itself

by Wendy McElroy April 3, 2020

If a government wishes to alleviate, rather than aggravate, a depression, its only valid course is laissez-faire—to leave the economy alone. Only if there is no interference, direct or threatened, with prices, wage rates and business liquidation, will the necessary adjustment proceed with smooth dispatch. — Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression The economic disruption caused by ...

What Comes After the Coronavirus, Freedom or Despotism?

by Richard M. Ebeling April 2, 2020

Chinese The coronavirus crisis that has enveloped the world has brought about calls for society and economy-wide action on the part of governments that has been matched by the imposing of radical shutdowns and compulsory mass quarantining as tens of millions of people are told to not to go to work and to stay at home ...

Reform versus Liberty

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2020

Americans alive today have grown up in what libertarians term a welfare-warfare state. It is a system in which the primary purpose of the federal government is to take care of people and keep them safe and secure. This type of governmental system is also sometimes referred to as a paternalistic state, given that the federal government essentially plays ...

Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid

by James Bovard April 1, 2020

Foreign aid to Ukraine helped spur the Democrats’ effort to impeach and remove President Trump earlier this year. Ukraine was supposed to be on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by U.S. government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid ...

Religion and Education in a Free Society

by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2020

Montgomery County, Maryland, which lies just outside of Washington, D.C., is one of America’s richest and most populous counties. It is also home to the largest school system in Maryland and fourteenth-largest in the United States. For the current school year (2019-2020), the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system has 208 schools, more than 165,000 students, more than 24,000 ...

Fifty Years of Statist Policies and Economic Fallacies

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 2020

It is about fifty years since, as an undergraduate, I took my first economics classes in college. Virtually all my professors were adamant that unrestrained market capitalism was unworkable, and on the way out. Planning, many of them said, was the future for complex societies and economic development. Like “deva vu, all over again,” the same claims are being ...

The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 1

by Danny Sjursen April 1, 2020

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 I had a horror of the Mexican War ... only I had not the moral courage enough to resign. — Ulysses S. Grant (1879) The phrase “regime change wars” has, of late, taken on profound meaning and stoked massive controversy. ...

Preventing Liberty from Becoming a Coronavirus Fatality

by Ted Galen Carpenter March 30, 2020

Public attitudes about the coronavirus outbreak increasingly exhibit features of a collective panic. That development creates the danger that government measures designed to deal with a very real public health problem may lead to enormous collateral damage both to the economy and the freedoms that Americans take for granted. Governments at all levels have taken ever more extreme (even outrageous) ...

The Wrong Solution to Welfare Marriage Penalties

by Laurence M. Vance March 27, 2020

The typical wedding ceremony, reception, and honeymoon can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Although all of it may be paid for up front, soon afterward, or during the first year of marriage, some couples continue to pay throughout their married life because of the marriage penalty in the tax code. A marriage penalty or bonus results when the combined ...

Leaving People Alone Is the Best Way to Beat the Coronavirus

by Richard M. Ebeling March 24, 2020

The world has rapidly moved into a seemingly aggressive paternalistic planning mode in the face of the Coronavirus crisis. Many voices are heard to say that personal and economic liberties must be restricted or even temporarily banned. At the same time, many of those same voices are saying that at a moment like this government spending, for all intents ...

How the Police State Will Deal with a Coronavirus Outbreak

by John W. Whitehead March 20, 2020

“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, ...

To Kill Markets Is the Worst Possible Plan

by Richard M. Ebeling March 19, 2020

Momentous events usually leave strong memories on those who have lived through them, and those memories often become passed on to later generations in the form of historical interpretations of why and what had happened in the past. This has certainly been so in the cases of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Civil Rights Movement, the ...