Daily Articles

Reform versus Liberty

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 5, 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 ...

Freedom Requires Resisting Coronavirus Pessimism

by Richard M. Ebeling June 4, 2020

“I’m from the government, and I am here to help!” This line has become a cynical joke among large numbers of Americans, and it often cuts across differences of political opinion concerning the role and activities of government in modern American society. This has continued with the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, and especially the longer it goes ...

This Is Not a Revolution. It’s a Blueprint for Locking Down the Nation

by John W. Whitehead June 2, 2020

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. — John Lennon Brace yourselves. There is something being concocted in the dens of power, ...

Sickness Is The Health Of The State!

by David Stockman June 1, 2020

A hundred years ago in response to the horror of WWI, the great Randolph Bourne famously pronounced the truth that “War is the Health of the State.” Said Bourne, War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups ...

Free the Liquor Stores!

by Laurence M. Vance May 28, 2020

The Fine Wine & Good Spirits liquor stores are slowly beginning to reopen in Pennsylvania after they were all closed on March 17 in response to the spread of the coronavirus. On May 8, 77 stores reopened. On May 15, 155 more stores reopened. On May 22, 50 more stores were opened. During the time when ...

Doctors With Hacksaws

by David Stockman May 27, 2020

It started in sheer madness on March 13 when the Donald was persuaded to declare a national emergency by his camarilla of dopey doctors. Their stay-at-home guidelines were absolute folly because by then it was obvious that the new Wuhan virus strain mainly attacked the aged, infirm and those already afflicted with serious cardiovascular, respiratory, renal and diabetes/obesity ailments, not ...

Trump: I Can and Will Start Wars Whenever I Please

by Michael Tennant May 26, 2020

President Donald Trump’s May 6 veto of a Senate resolution that would have required him to seek congressional approval for any further military confrontations with Iran demonstrates that, despite his occasional feints toward scaling back foreign intervention, Trump is as much a warmonger as anyone else in Washington. Worse still, his explanation for his veto indicates that he believes ...

The Slippery Slope to Despotism

by John W. Whitehead May 22, 2020

You have no right not to be vaccinated, you have no right not to wear a mask, you have no right to open up your business… And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor's office and plunge a needle into your arm. —Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor You ...

Achieving Freedom

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 21, 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 ...

There Will Be No Recovery Without Production

by Richard M. Ebeling May 19, 2020

Through most of the coronavirus crisis, those who have made the case for stay-at-home, reduce or stop work, and narrow the range of retail shopping to assure “social distancing” to reduce the spread of the virus have accused their critics of being more interested in preserving livelihoods than “saving lives.” But there is no preservation of any lives if ...

Capitalism, Freedom, and Progress

by George Leef May 18, 2020

Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin Press, 2018); 496 pages. Almost everyone knows Alan Greenspan as the long-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve System. What far fewer know is that in his younger days, Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand and her anti-collectivist philosophy. ...

The Great College-Hunger Hoax

by James Bovard May 14, 2020

“Nearly half our college students are going hungry,” presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proclaimed in late November. Sanders’s tweet went viral, spurring more than 20,000 re-tweets and “likes.” Starving college students are a new rallying cry for social-justice warriors, spurring demands for new federal handouts and maybe even a college student-meal program modeled after school lunches. Some colleges are hyping hungry students ...