Free Society

Freedom Frauds: Obama’s Forgotten Constitutional Depredations

by James Bovard September 19, 2018

Bureaucratic bulldozing? Groping TSA agents? Federal secrecy and aggressive prosecution of journalists? This is the legacy that Obama passed to Trump. Go to the audio podcast. View other episodes of Freedom Frauds.

What I Don’t Like About Life in Post-9/11 America

by John W. Whitehead September 12, 2018

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”―Edward Abbey, American author Life in a post-9/11 America increasingly feels like an endless free fall down a rabbit hole into a terrifying, dystopian alternative reality in which the citizenry has no rights, the government is no friend to freedom, and everything we ever knew and loved about ...

The Ongoing War on the American People

by John W. Whitehead August 24, 2018

“A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any reason, is a government with a taste of blood and a thirst for power and must either be smartly rebuked, or blindly obeyed in deadly fear.”—John Salter Police in a small Georgia town tasered a 5-foot-2, 87-year-old woman who was using a kitchen knife to cut ...

Libertarian Lessons: Conscription

by Scott McPherson August 23, 2018

Authoritarians love conscription because it turns human beings into resources, for the factory or the battlefield. The idea receives support from across the political spectrum, either (a) to fight wars abroad, or (b) for the development of a “youth corps” providing “free” services at home. Neither excuse justifies enslaving young people to serve the interests of the political class. At ...

The Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the Meaning of Liberalism

by Richard M. Ebeling August 15, 2018

The world has always been an uncertain place, and this is no less true today. After the collapse of communism in the 1990s, there was confidence that democracy had won and the market economy had shown its superiority to government planning. This is no longer the case, with the rise of populism, a rebirth of nationalism, and a reawakened ...

There Is No Right to Read a Newspaper

by Laurence M. Vance August 10, 2018

The newspaper industry has been waning over the past few decades. Dozens of newspapers have folded since the advent of the Internet. According to the Pew Research Center, local newspaper circulation has declined by 27 percent over the last fifteen years and the number of statehouse reporters has fallen by nearly 40 percent. The latest victim is ...

The Dangers of Totalitarian Planning, Past and Present

by Richard M. Ebeling August 2, 2018

Liberty is a delicate idea and institution. While people say they want freedom, fight under the banner of freedom, and even sometimes die for its preservation and advancement, determining what it actually means to be free and to live in a free society seems often elusive and controversial. What it means for a society to be free is, perhaps, easier ...

Beltway Baloney on “Speaking Truth to Power”

by James Bovard August 1, 2018

Lying and piety go together in Washington like ham and eggs. After 9/11, a profusion of government falsehoods on Iraq and other topics ravaged official credibility. The political class responded with an endless profusion of promises to “speak truth to power.” Unfortunately, there are far more Washingtonians praising honesty than there are honest politicians. According to Wikipedia, “Speaking truth to ...

Freedom’s Frauds

by George Leef August 1, 2018

Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty by James Bovard (Future of Freedom, 2017), 184 pages. James Bovard has been a thorn in the side of the statists for decades. His books and columns have exposed the incompetence, hypocrisy, arrogance, and sheer venality of the American political class much as H.L. Mencken did in the early part ...

A New World Order

by John W. Whitehead July 12, 2018

“There are no nations. There are no peoples ... There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.”—Network (1976) There are those who will tell you that any mention ...

The Beautiful Philosophy of Liberalism

by Richard M. Ebeling July 10, 2018

There has been a great paradox in the modern world. On the one hand, freedom and prosperity have replaced tyranny and poverty for tens, indeed for hundreds of millions of people around the world over the last two centuries. Yet the political and economic system that historically has made this possible has been criticized and condemned. That political and ...

The Hypocrisy of the Left on Discrimination

by Laurence M. Vance July 6, 2018

The U.S. Supreme Court recently rendered its verdict in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The High Court ruled, by a vote of 7-2, in favor of the plaintiff, Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, who was charged with violating anti-discrimination laws when he refused to make ...