Dear Friend of Freedom:
I am writing to ask you to help us fund a special project that involves reprinting in booklet form an 11-part essay entitled Economic Liberty and the Constitution, which I wrote for our monthly journal, Freedom Daily, in 2003. This essay is a direct, frontal assault on the socialism, interventionism, and fiat-money standard that have pervaded our land since at the least the time of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal.
Economic Liberty and the Constitution explains the philosophy of economic liberty from the standpoint of both law and economics. Beginning with the concept of fundamental rights and limited government in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it proceeds to explain the principles of free enterprise and sound money on which our nation was founded.
Revolving around major decisions on economic liberty of the U.S. Supreme Court, such as the Legal Tender Cases, the Slaughterhouse Case, Lochner v. New York, and the Gold Clause Cases, the essay delves into the major intellectual battles that took place between socialists and free-market defenders during the late 1800s and that continued all the way to the culmination of the battle in 1937.
It explains how economic liberty came to be adopted and then abandoned in our country. It also explains the background to Americas heritage of sound money in the context of the gold standard, legal-tender laws, Roosevelts confiscation of gold, and the disastrous embrace of a paper-money standard and the Federal Reserve System.
Why do we wish to publish this essay now? Because with crisis comes opportunity. In bad times, people begin to listen, to reflect, to think about whats truly important in life. Freedom principles are no longer so esoteric. They now have real meaning to a persons life and the lives of his family members. This booklet will provide another means to get people to think about and reflect on the real reasons our nation is in such bad trouble today.
As you know, under the Obama administration federal spending continues to soar out of control. Bank bailouts. Stimulus plans. Welfare and regulatory programs. Pork. The drug war. Foreign wars and occupations. The ghosts of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes are inhabiting the political and bureaucratic halls of Washington, D.C. Federal officials just keep spending and spending and spending.
These policies cannot have a good ending. They are inexorably moving our nation in the direction of inflation, monetary debauchery, capital consumption, a lower standard of living, and possibly even national bankruptcy. Economic and political liberty are the principles that can lead us out of this morass.
To whom do we plan to distribute the essay? We plan to distribute it free primarily to high-school and college students who are excited about libertarianism and Austrian economics. Judging from the fire in the belly of the students at George Mason University who are co-sponsoring our Economic Liberty Lecture Series, we are confident that there are thousands of libertarian students all across the land who would love to add this essay to their intellectual arsenal. We also plan to distribute the essay to people who are attending libertarian, hard-money, and home-schooling conferences by having it inserted in participants packages, with the hope that they will spread the principles of the essay to their friends and acquaintances.
Other news on the economic-liberty front. Noted libertarian historian Jim Powell, who authored the excellent book FDRs Folly, has recently become a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is writing a regular column exposing the fallacies and destructiveness of various aspects of Roosevelts New Deal that we have been sharing with subscribers to our FFF Email Update and visitors to our website. These are fantastic, relatively short, easily readable essays, many of which we have been sending to newspapers on our op-ed list.
News on the foreign-policy and civil-liberties front. We are not letting up in the defense of civil liberties and a noninterventionist foreign policy, a battle in which we have taken a leading role for the past eight years. In fact, civil liberties and foreign policy are more important than ever, given President Obamas almost full embrace of the pro-empire, anti-civil-liberties policies of the Bush administration. A few months ago we retained the noted British author Andy Worthington, who authored the excellent book The Guantnamo Files and who recently became a policy advisor at FFF, to write a weekly column for us keeping our readers updated on the war on terrorism and civil liberties.
So now we have two fronts foreign and domestic on which we must focus our efforts in what is the most important intellectual and moral battle of our time. Quite frankly, we welcome the challenge, and we are more convinced than ever that libertarian ideas will ultimately prevail over statist ones.
We need your help to bring this essay into booklet form. Our goal is to publish and distribute at least 25,000 copies, which will cost us approximately $20,000. Will you give us a hand?
Many thanks for your consideration, your commitment to the principles of liberty, and your great support of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Yours for liberty,
Jacob G. Hornberger
P.S. A donation of $100 or more will get you an autographed copy of the booklet.
P.P.S. One of the ways through which we have been able to sustain our operations over the 20 years of our existence has been generous bequests from supporters. I hope you will keep The Future of Freedom Foundation in mind in your planned giving.