Freedom Daily Archive

Defending the Foundations of Freedom for 30 Years

by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2020

This January 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of The Future of Freedom Foundation’s monthly publication, Future of Freedom, which at its beginning was called Freedom Daily. Three decades means a total of 360 issues, containing even more hundreds of articles. Virtually every important policy issue, foreign and domestic, was written about as those months and years went by. The world ...

The Long Shadow of World War I and America’s War on Dissent, Part 2

by Danny Sjursen January 1, 2020

Part 1 Upon U.S. entry into the war, in 1917 the Wilson administration proposed and a compliant Congress almost immediately passed the Espionage Act, a direct attack on American press freedom. The law criminalized newspaper journalists who dared to oppose the war, question the official narrative, or encourage dissent. Massive fines and stiff prison sentences were dealt out with ...

Freedom and Prosperity: The Importance of Sound Money

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2019

Sound money is a key to a free and prosperous society. That principle was clearly reflected in the monetary system that the Constitution established when it called the federal government into existence. Our ancestors didn’t trust government officials with power. They believed that the greatest threat to their own freedom and well-being lay not with some foreign regime but rather ...

Gun Seizures Could Lead to Civil War

by James Bovard December 1, 2019

“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” declared “Beto” O’Rourke at a Democratic party presidential candidate debate in September. Compelling Americans to surrender their so-called assault weapons is “the newest purity test” for Democratic presidential candidates, according to the Washington Post. O’Rourke and other Democratic presidential candidates, including Cory Booker, Kristin Gillibrand, and Bill de Blasio (now withdrawn ...

Unlibertarian Libertarianism

by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2019

Just like liberals, conservatives, progressives, populists, and constitutionalists — but certainly not as bad — libertarians are not always consistent when it comes to libertarianism. In fact, what some libertarians propose is unlibertarian libertarianism. Libertarianism Libertarianism is the philosophy that says that people should be free from individual, societal, or government interference to live their lives any way they desire, pursue ...

Understanding the Freedom We Have Lost

by Richard M. Ebeling December 1, 2019

Few people can really understand what life is like in a totalitarian state unless they have lived there or have had the opportunity to visit such a society for an extended period of time. For most Americans it seems like an impenetrable world that is not easily comprehended. How can you imagine living in a society with virtually none ...

The Long Shadow of World War I and America’s War on Dissent, Part 1

by Danny Sjursen December 1, 2019

Part 2 “War is the health of the state.” So said the eerily prescient and uncompromising anti-war radical Randolph Bourne in the very midst of what Europeans called the Great War, a nihilistic conflict that eventually consumed the lives of at least 9 million soldiers, including some 50,000 Americans. He meant, ultimately, that wars — especially foreign wars — ...

A Limited-Government Republic versus a National-Security State

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 2019

The worst mistake that the American people have made in the entire history of the United States was to permit the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state. That conversion has played a major role in the diminishment of limited government and the destruction of our liberty, privacy, and economic well-being. What is a national-security state? It ...

Banning Guns Will Not Make Schools Safe

by James Bovard November 1, 2019

School shootings have become the latest pretext for politicians to destroy the Second Amendment. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, declared in a Democratic presidential candidates’ debate, “I was part of the first generation that saw routine school shootings. We have now produced the second school-shooting generation in this country. We dare not allow there to be a ...

Why I Am So Passionate about Ending the Drug War

by Laurence M. Vance November 1, 2019

Since 2009, I have written about ninety articles on the subject of the drug war, many of them for the Future of Freedom Foundation, and some of them for this very publication. I have maintained throughout these articles that the war on drugs is a monstrous evil that has ruined more lives than drugs themselves; that the war on ...

Examples of Dedication to Freedom

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 2019

When Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992) wrote his famous book The Road to Serfdom (1944) in the midst of the Second World War, he mentioned in the preface that he had often been told by his socialist colleagues that he would, no doubt, hold an important position in a future planned society, if only he would come around ...

The Roots of Mass Incarceration

by Michael Swanson November 1, 2019

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton (Harvard University Press, 2016), 449 pages. Before the war on the drugs there was the war on crime. In 1975 the police department of Washington, D.C., launched “Operation Sting” in partnership with the FBI and the ...