I am writing to seek your end-of-year financial support for The Future of Freedom Foundation to help us advance liberty in the year ahead.
When I discovered libertarianism in my late 20s, more than 40 years ago, the biggest revelation for me was that I was not actually a free person. All my life — especially during my years in public schools and state-supported college and law school — I had been indoctrinated with the notion that I was a free person living in a free society. The words of country singer Lee Greenwood’s song God Bless the USA — “And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free” — reflected my mindset. I embodied the words of Johann Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
And then I discovered libertarianism, which enabled me to see that I wasn’t free at all and that I wasn’t living in a free society. I realized I had been lied to all my life. It was at that moment that I decided that I wanted to live as a genuinely free person. It must be a tremendously exhilarating feeling to be genuinely free. Once I discovered the truth, I became determined to do everything I could to achieve freedom.
Libertarianism and liberty
Libertarianism is the greatest political and economic philosophy known to man. It is founded on sound economic, moral, philosophical, religious, and ethical principles, and it is the only ideology that can extricate us from the deep and destructive political and economic morass into which statists have plunged our nation.
My discovery of libertarianism changed the course of my life. Ever since I was a child, I had wanted to be a trial attorney, a dream that I achieved in 1975. After 12 years as a litigator, my desire to be free led me in a different direction — into the libertarian educational arena and as program director at The Foundation for Economic Education in New York, whose founder, Leonard E. Read, had played a tremendously important role in my libertarian education.
In 1989, I founded The Future of Freedom Foundation, whose mission is to present the principled, uncompromising case for the libertarian philosophy. It is a mission that we have successfully fulfilled, with the generous support of our donors, for the past 34 years.
Why have we always been so committed to genuine libertarian principles? The answer is simple: measures that are designed to reform the welfare-warfare state way of life under which we live are not freedom and will not get us to freedom. At best, such reforms can improve our lives as welfare-warfare-state serfs, but they are not freedom. To achieve freedom — genuine freedom — we have to remove, dismantle, abolish, repeal, or eradicate infringements on freedom.
Our methodology
Today, there is significant darkness when it comes to freedom. Welfare-warfare statists are taking our country down from within with their socialist and regulatory programs and their out-of-control federal spending, debt, and monetary debauchery. Even worse, they continue unleashing violence, death, and destruction with their interventionist antics abroad and are, once again, getting us perilously close to nuclear war.
But it’s always darkest before the dawn. The intellectual and political situation today is entirely different than it was 40 years ago when I discovered libertarianism. The libertarian philosophy has grown in favor during the past four decades. Today, libertarianism is practically a household word.
To achieve a genuinely free society, we need a critical mass of people who want to be free and who understand what genuine freedom is. That’s what we do here at The Future of Freedom Foundation. We make the principled, uncompromising case for liberty, with the aim of finding people who are naturally inclined toward libertarianism. We are looking for those individuals who are prepared for the same breakthrough that I had when I discovered libertarianism.
It is impossible to know how close we are to the critical mass of people that can bring a paradigm shift toward a genuinely free society. What matters is that we continue persevering toward achieving liberty by making the principled, uncompromising case for the free society. As George Washington stated, “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.” Let us continue leading America — and the world — to freedom!
I hope our work here at The Future of Freedom Foundation has earned your continued generous support for the year ahead.
Yours for liberty,
Jacob Hornberger
P.S. Check out our book Freedom Daily: Daily Quotations on Liberty. It’s a great Christmas gift.