Daily Articles

The Jackboots Are Coming

by John W. Whitehead June 21, 2019

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism How do you persuade a populace to embrace ...

What Robert Reich Failed to Say about Marijuana Legalization

by Laurence M. Vance June 20, 2019

Professor, economist, author, and political commentator Robert Reich is best known for being President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997. Before that he held positions in the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and was a professor at Harvard. After leaving the Labor Department he taught at Brandeis University, ran for ...

Debt, Deficits and the Cost of Free Lunches

by Richard M. Ebeling June 19, 2019

It seems that every generation or two, fundamental economic ideas are questioned and challenged. The reasonable and important idea that governments should balance their budgets on an annual basis was challenged in the 1930s by the rise of Keynesian Economics and the counter-argument that deficit spending was desirable, if it was used to maintain full employment. Now it seems ...

Background Checks Violate Property Rights

by Benedict D. LaRosa June 18, 2019

In the early 1990s, I accompanied a friend and his 12-year-old son to a local gun show. My friend wished to purchase a .22 caliber rifle with which to teach his son to shoot safely and effectively. After much browsing, he found one at a reasonable price, one that suited both his needs and those of his son. The ...

Charter Schools Are Still Public Schools

by Laurence M. Vance June 17, 2019

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has issued his “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education.” His ten-point plan addresses the serious crisis in our education system by reducing racial and economic segregation in our public school system, attracting the best and the brightest educational professionals to teach in our classrooms, and reestablishing a positive learning environment for ...

America’s Economic Commissar of Trade

by Richard M. Ebeling June 14, 2019

Since taking office in January 2017, President Donald Trump seems to have declared or threatened economic war on many of America’s leading economic trading partners, including China, the European Union, and most recently Mexico. Two things stand out in all this: first, he presumes that international trade is a zero-sum game in which if the U.S. wins, some other ...

The Libertarian Angle: Tariff-Wall Man’s Extortion of Mexico (video)

by Future of Freedom Foundation June 13, 2019

Are barriers to both immigration and trade the hallmarks of a free society? Do they make the citizens of The United States better off? FFF president Jacob G. Hornberger and Citadel professor Richard M. Ebeling discuss. Go to the podcast.

The Omnipresent Surveillance State

by John W. Whitehead June 12, 2019

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984 Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. It’s been 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing ...

The Russians Are Coming!

by Christine Smith June 11, 2019

The Russians are coming! Sure they are, and the sky is falling too. Based on rhetoric, you'd think the United States government was now stealthily undermined by Russians. With never-ending allegations of Russian interference/collusion and even the absurd implication that the duly elected president might be a Russian agent, along with all the other continual anti-Russia references these days, the Red ...

Should People Be Paid for Not Working?

by Laurence M. Vance June 7, 2019

Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2020 budget (Oct. 1, 2019–Sept. 30, 2020), “A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First,” largely mirrors his two previous budgets for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. In spite of Democratic criticism of Trump’s “cruel,” “shortsighted,” “toxic,” “destructive” budget, it is just like the budgets of his ...

Why Neo-liberalism Is Really Neo-socialism

by Richard M. Ebeling June 7, 2019

If there is one common enemy that all opponents of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government seemingly can agree upon it is the “evil” of neo-liberalism. Everything that is hated in an open, competitive market society is summed into that word and condemned. The problem is that actual free market liberalism has nothing to do with its “neo-liberal” ...

How the Police State Muzzles Our Right to Speak Truth to Power

by John W. Whitehead June 6, 2019

“History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence ...