Free Society

The Jackboots Of The Virus Patrol

by David Stockman April 20, 2020

Say what? It seems that the mainstream politicians and commentariat have gone so far off the deep-end on the Covid-19 that it takes a pair of socialists from south of the border to clear the air. That’s right. We are referring to Mr .Lopez-Gatell, Mexico’s minister of health and pedigreed PhD epidemiologist from John-Hopkins and his boss, President Obrador, a true ...

Will there Be Tyranny in the Post-Coronavirus World?

by Richard M. Ebeling April 16, 2020

The coronavirus crisis will be considered one of the most important global events of the early decades of the 21st century. Like a pebble that is dropped in a pond of water from which a series of waves are sent out across its surface, the virus has created waves of hundreds of thousands of human victims in countries all ...

The Press Conference Trump Should Hold Now

by Richard M. Ebeling April 7, 2020

Every late afternoon, the American people have been able to tune into a presidential press conference detailing the day’s events and governmental decisions concerning the coronavirus. Donald Trump is usually joined by vice president Mike Pence, and medical experts, Dr. Anthony Fouci and Dr. Deborah Birx, who are on the president’s coronavirus taskforce, plus other members of his presidential ...

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 ...

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 ...

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) ...

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, ...

Tradition and Why the Russians are Who They Are

by Richard M. Ebeling March 13, 2020

It is often said to be misplaced and inappropriate to use stereotypes when talking about people or entire nations. To do so is unfair to the wide diversity that exists among the individual citizens of any country over time or during any particular period of time. And this is no doubt true, but, nonetheless, there are such things as ...

Coronavirus vs. the Mass Surveillance State: Which Poses the Greater Threat?

by John W. Whitehead March 10, 2020

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the ...

Achieving Freedom

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2020

Achieving freedom necessarily depends on removing infringements on freedom. If all that we libertarians succeed in doing is modifying, reforming, or improving infringements on freedom, the most we will have achieved is an improvement in our condition as serfs living under America’s welfare-warfare-state way. That would be good. But it would not be freedom. Consider life in 1850 Alabama. Imagine ...