Free Society

Frank Chodorov’s Peaceful, Persistent Revolution, Part 2

by Wendy McElroy July 1, 2021

Part 1 | Part 2 Chodorov’s rejection of war was motivated largely by the growth of the state that accompanied it and that savaged individual freedom. Chapter 11 of his autobiography, entitled “Isolationism,” summarized his position: When the enemy is at the city gates, or the illusion that he is coming... the tendency is to turn over to the captain ...

“Progressives” Blame F. A. Hayek for Everything They Dislike

by Richard M. Ebeling June 30, 2021

There is the ideologically captured mind that squeezes all the complexities, diversities, uncertainties, and serendipities of life into one limited dimension of cause and explanation. One such mind is that of Wellesley College historian, Quinn Slobodian, who sees everywhere the manipulating agents of a nefarious “capitalism.” Even what seems as differing or even opposing ideas are placed through an analytical ...

George Orwell’s 1984 Has Become a Blueprint for Our Dystopian Reality

by John W. Whitehead June 29, 2021

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”— George Orwell, 1984 Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and ...

The FBI’s Mafia-Style Justice: To Fight Crime, the FBI Sponsors 15 Crimes a Day

by John W. Whitehead June 21, 2021

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”— Friedrich Nietzsche Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. Think about it. Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. ...

Free Market Liberalism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

by Richard M. Ebeling June 9, 2021

The recent 11 days of warfare between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has once more raised the issue of one-state or two-state “solutions” to the over seven decade Israel-Palestinian conflict. In the long run, neither is a viable option outside of a politics of individual liberty and an economics of free markets. There was a two-state solution laid out in ...

Make Way for the Snitch State

by John W. Whitehead June 3, 2021

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we ...

Biden’s Rescue Act Targets Americans’ Freedoms

by James Bovard June 1, 2021

Since the 1800s, surly Americans have derided politicians for spending tax dollars “like drunken sailors.” Until recently, that was considered a grave character fault. But Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act shows that inebriated spending is now the path to national salvation. It was a common saying in America in the 1930s that “we cannot squander our way to prosperity.” ...

The Seven Deadly Sins of Government

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2021

What do King Solomon, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great), Dante Alighieri, and Mohandas Gandhi have to do with modern governments? Nothing, really, except that their emphasis on seven deadly evils provides us with the perfect pattern to categorize the deadly sins of government. “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him,” said King ...

Total Tyranny

by John W. Whitehead May 21, 2021

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford It never fails. Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again. In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that ...

Victimhood Professionals Exploit Victims: Look at VAWA

by Wendy McElroy May 10, 2021

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is currently in the Senate awaiting debate and reauthorization. VAWA is the federal touchstone for how sexual abuse, especially domestic violence (DV), is addressed and funded nationwide. It has vastly expanded from its 1994 roots and epitomizes not only the inevitable drift of government toward greater power but also the dynamics ...

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 ...