Freedom Daily Archive

The Founding Fathers’ “Great Rule” for U.S. Foreign Policy

by Elizabeth Cobbs January 1, 2018

People who don’t get heard have a tendency to shout. Eventually they get mad. For too long, foreign-policy experts have stuck their fingers in their ears when confronted by citizens ambivalent about playing global police officer. Republican Donald Trump is channeling their voices through his electric bullhorn, whipping up the crowd and questioning the validity of institutions like NATO. Regardless ...

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2017

James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, wrote that of all the enemies to liberty, war is the greatest. What he meant by that is that governments inevitably use wars and other crises and emergencies to centralize and expand their powers over the citizenry. Thus, in the process of claiming to keep the citizenry safe from external threats, ...

Guilt by Musical Association

by James Bovard December 1, 2017

Should the feds be permitted to treat anyone who is not a choirboy like a criminal suspect? Unfortunately, local, state, and federal agencies have a long history of targeting, harassing, and entrapping fans of untraditional music. Because so many innocuous activities have become criminalized in recent decades, it has never been easier for the feds to tar any group ...

The Problem with Conservatism

by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2017

Nikolai G. Wenzel has a problem with conservatism. A libertarian, Wenzel is a Research Fellow at the University of Paris Law School’s Center for Law & Economics and the coauthor (with conservative Nathan W. Schlueter) of Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate (Stanford Economic and Finance, 2017). This book is the only “debate book” between ...

Smith Act Tyranny Against Communists

by Wendy McElroy December 1, 2017

When a state officially declares war on another state, it unofficially declares war on a second front: domestic dissidents. The dynamics of the latter can be seen by tracking one of the most powerful phenomena of the last century: the Red Scare(s). Anti-communist hysteria followed World War I and did not cease until the fall of the Soviet Union ...

Limited Government and a Free Society, Part 1

by Gregory Bresiger December 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Presidential use of the executive order, along with its relative, the executive agreement, has become the “very definition of tyranny” and an affront to limited government. The use of executive orders has dramatically increased over time. George Washington issued about one executive order a year. However, by ...

The National Security-State and JFK, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Within a few hours of John Kennedy’s assassination, an anti-Castro organization in New Orleans called the DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil) issued a press release publicizing that Lee Harvey Oswald, who had just been arrested in connection with the assassination, was a communist. The allegation ...

Why Ruby Ridge Still Matters

by James Bovard November 1, 2017

In the wake of violent clashes between protesters last August in Charlottesville, many people demanded a federal crackdown on suspected dangerous extremists. The federal government has previously carried out similar heavy-handed suppression efforts with disastrous results. Rather than intellectually purifying the nation, such efforts are far more likely to turn nitwits into martyrs. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington’s ...

Middlemen, Government, and the Free Market

by Laurence M. Vance November 1, 2017

There are multitudes of ways in which goods are exchanged on the free market. The most common way that most people purchase merchandise is by shopping at a general or specialty retail store: Walmart, Sears, Kroger, Home Depot, Office Depot, Target, Best Buy, Walgreens, and so on. But in addition to retail stores, goods are also sold through auctions, ...

Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld: Abolitionists and Feminists

by Neera K. Badhwar November 1, 2017

The American women’s rights movement was born in the bosom of the abolitionist movement. The 19th-century abolitionists and feminists Sarah (1792–1873) and Angelina Grimké (1805–1879) were the first female agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society, as well as pioneers of the American women’s rights movement. Their arguments for women’s rights anticipated many of John Stuart Mill’s arguments in The ...

Debauching the Currency

by James Cook November 1, 2017

Often people who make gloomy predictions about the economy have an ulterior motive. They want to sell a newsletter, a book, precious metals, or even storage food. In some cases they have no basis for their views other than an opinion. I like to think that what I write originates with the economic thinkers of the Austrian School of ...

Another Bloody American Century

by Matthew Harwood November 1, 2017

The Violent American Century: War and Terror since World War II by John W. Dower (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017; 184 pages) Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) was livid. “In the dead of night,” the California Democrat wrote on Twitter in July, House Speaker Paul Ryan did something “underhanded and undemocratic.” He stripped out her bipartisan amendment to repeal ...