Free Society

Building Up the State Means Pulling People Down

by Richard M. Ebeling May 7, 2021

I still vividly recall sitting with a high school friend on the evening of July 20, 1969 and watching on television as astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of the moon, a few minutes before 8 p.m., west coast Pacific time, and saying his famous words, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” ...

An Old Geezer on Learning about Liberty and Its Loss

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2021

I am now in my 70s. No longer a spring chicken but not a dead duck yet either, with, I hope, a few good years left. When I was in my mid 20s, I had the opportunity and good fortune to meet and interact for most of two summers with the noted Austrian economist and Nobel Prize winner Friedrich ...

Rule by Fiat: When the Government Does Whatever It Wants

by John W. Whitehead April 19, 2021

“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” — Ayn Rand Rule by brute force. That’s about as good a description ...

Will Treason Mania Destroy America?

by James Bovard April 1, 2021

At the start of the Biden era, America is being torn apart by more allegations of treason than at any time since the Civil War. Historian Henry Adams observed a century ago that politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” And few things spur hatred more effectively than tarring all political opponents as traitors. The Founding Fathers carved ...

Wars and “Following the Science” are Sure Paths to Tyranny

by Richard M. Ebeling March 31, 2021

In the first press conference of his presidency on March 25, 2021, Joe Biden announced that he had set a target of administering 200 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine before the end of his first 100 days in office. In an earlier statement before the press, Biden said that it might be safe enough for the government to ...

Welcome to Word Tyranny and Cultural Balkanization

by Richard M. Ebeling March 16, 2021

America has entered into a new era of thought control. Back in the 1960s, there was a determined campaign by many conservatives to resist the free speech movement symbolically headquartered on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Then, the idea was to respect people’s right to say what was on their minds, even when it was considered ...

Lin Yutang, a Classical Liberal Voice for a Free China

by Richard M. Ebeling March 9, 2021

China Rising! The news media has stories every day about China’s continued positioning as a geopolitical and economic “power” on the international stage. Beijing says its economy will have strong growth in 2021, as it increases military spending to back up China’s gunboat diplomacy in East Asia, and stifles any remaining residues of democracy and civil liberties in Hong ...

Post-Covid Policy Advice from Ludwig von Mises for Developing Countries

by Richard M. Ebeling March 2, 2021

The coronavirus and the government responses with shutdowns and lockdowns, along with restrictions on international travel and disruptions of the global supply chains that crisscross countries and continents, have made a fuller and more rapid recovery difficult in the Western industrialized countries, but even more so in many places in what used to be called during the Cold War, ...

The Conflict of the Ages

by Laurence M. Vance March 1, 2021

The year 2020 was a dreadful year as it relates to individual liberty, free association, commercial freedom, and private property, and 2021 isn’t looking much better. The main reason, of course, is not the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), but the government response to it. Volumes could be written about the government-mandated restrictions on peaceful activity  that have been instituted during this ...

The Slippery Slope from Censoring ‘Disinformation’ to Silencing Truth

by John W. Whitehead February 23, 2021

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”― George Orwell This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it. In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of ...

The Deep State’s Stealthy, Subversive, Silent Coup to Ensure Nothing Changes

by John W. Whitehead February 1, 2021

You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country…why in the name of God don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hell-bent to protect? You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ...

Witnessing Lithuania’s 1991 Fight for Freedom from Soviet Power

by Richard M. Ebeling January 13, 2021

Individual liberty and representative democracy as complementary forms of personal and political self-government are precious aspects of shared social life. Given the political and economic events surrounding the recent presidential election and the restrictions on personal freedom due to the government-imposed lockdowns in the face of the coronavirus, it seems appropriate to recall a real fight for a free ...