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Understanding Freedom and Faith in Freedom

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There are two major obstacles to achieving a genuinely free society in our lifetime: one, a lack of understanding of the genuine principles of freedom, and two, a lack of faith in freedom. The first obstacle involves principally nonlibertarians. The second obstacle involves everyone, including libertarians. If someone were to conduct a survey among the American people today in which people were asked if they felt they lived in a free society, I would bet that the vast majority of Americans would respond yes. Sure, Americans complain about how the federal government operates, about the large amount of federal spending and debt, about regulatory mishaps, about the adverse results of various foreign interventions and wars, and about various other aspects of the welfare-warfare state system under which Americans live. But I believe that most Americans would willingly agree with singer Lee Greenwald’s refrain, “I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.” My favorite quote is by the ...

Immigration, Freedom, and the Price System

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Rightwing proponents of America’s socialist system of immigration controls claim that foreign citizens should not be able to enter the United States without “permission.” They are referring to the need to secure “permission” from two entities — the federal government and the private sector. In making their “permission” argument to justify America’s socialist system of immigration controls, conservatives display their lack of understanding of the principles of freedom and free markets. When anyone needs to secure permission from the government to exercise fundamental, God-given rights, we automatically know that that is not a free society. Freedom and governmental permission are opposites. When you have to ask the government for permission to engage in a purely peaceful act, you are not free. You are a serf who is asking, “Master, may I?” As Thomas Jefferson pointed out in the Declaration of Independence, everyone in the world (that is, not only American citizens) has been endowed with natural, God-given rights. ...

The Schengen Area’s Open Borders

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In a blog post at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has an interesting reminder of the virtues of open borders in Europe. Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University, which arguably is the best free-market, Austrian economics department in the country. He is also the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center. Along with his GMU colleague Tyler Cowan, he is the co-author of Modern Principles of Economics. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other publications. The Schengen Area, Tabarrok reminds us, came into existence in 1995 with ten countries. It established a system of open borders between those ten members. Citizens of those nations could freely cross borders to enter the other nine countries. No passports or visas were necessary. People could freely live, tour, and work in the other nine countries. In essence, the system was the ...

America’s Forever Immigration Morass

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All my life I have witnessed America’s ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration morass, along with the endless laments, anguish, anxiety, and depression among American statists that have accompanied it. All of this mental anguish has caused immigration-control advocates for the last several decades to ceaselessly cry out for Congress to enact “comprehensive immigration reform” designed to finally — finally! — ...