Free Society

I’m Not Breaking Up with America This Valentine’s Day, and Neither Should You

by John W. Whitehead February 15, 2019

“There’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number ...

How the Word Liberalism Came to Mean Its Opposite

by Richard M. Ebeling February 14, 2019

Over time, words sometimes change their meanings or connotations. Think of the words naughty and nice. Apparently, naughty originally meant to have or be nothing (naught or zero), but then it took on the extra sense of something being worth nothing, until finally a person who was considered worth nothing became a bad individual, or at least someone who ...

These Are Dangerous Times, and the Government Is To Blame

by John W. Whitehead February 7, 2019

“As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America These are dangerous times. Mind you, when I say that these are dangerous times, it is not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which ...

Beware the Emergency State

by John W. Whitehead January 11, 2019

“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. ... Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to ...

Break the Cycle

by John W. Whitehead January 8, 2019

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.” — Edmund Burke Folks, it’s time to break the cycle. Let’s make 2019 the year we say no to the laundry list of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government for way too long. Let’s make 2019 the year we stop living in ...

Freedom Frauds: Fantasy-Based Political Philosophy

by James Bovard January 3, 2019

Jim is puzzled. Is equality a basis for a free society? Some leading philosophers seem to think so, but Jim is not so sure.

Government Shutdown or Not, the Police State Will Continue to Flourish

by John W. Whitehead January 2, 2019

“There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men.”—Ludwig von Mises The government has shut down again. At least, parts of the government have temporarily shut down over President Trump’s demand for a $5 billion border wall. Yet while these political games dominate news headlines, send the stock ...

Liberal Internationalism: True and False, Part 2

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2019

Part 1 | Part 2 The classical liberal international order of the nineteenth century was not planned or designed by anyone. It was, for the most part, the natural outgrowth of the expanding influence of a new political philosophy of freedom, free markets, and free trade. It began to emerge in the wake of the twenty-five years of war ...

The Little House on the Prairie of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Wendy McElroy January 1, 2019

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser (Metropolitan Books, 2017); 625 pages. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, is one of the finest biographies I have read, and a fully deserving winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Prairie Fires is the definitive depiction ...

Freedom Frauds: Peace on Earth from a One-Season Santa

by James Bovard December 19, 2018

Happy Festivus from Jim Bovard! Jim celebrates with a cheap cigar and a beer. But what beer should he drink? Go to the audio podcast.

The Blind Leading the Blind

by Laurence M. Vance December 7, 2018

First it was the deaf; now it is the blind. Back in 2010, Netflix was sued by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) for “discriminating against deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers because not all their streaming video had closed captions.” The NAD, with the support of the U.S. Justice Department, maintained that Netflix was a “place of ...

Preserved Primitivism Versus Freedom and Prosperity

by Richard M. Ebeling December 6, 2018

Recently the news media reported the death of a young Christian evangelical who was killed with bows and arrows by members of a primitive and isolated tribe that lives on an island in the Andaman chain in the eastern Indian Ocean. Many in the media expressed sadness for the young man’s demise but considered that compared to interfering in ...