Freedom Daily Archive

The Badlands of Executive Order 9066

by Matthew Harwood February 1, 2017

Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II by Richard Reeves (Henry Holt and Company, 2015); 384 pages. The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II by Jan Jarboe Russell (Scribner, 2015); 2015; 417 pages. One of the great scandals of American history is ...

The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 On the morning of September 21, 1976, former Chilean official Orlando Letelier was driving to work at the Institute for Policy Studies, a leftist public-policy institute in Washington, D.C. Accompanying him were his 25-year-old assistant Ronni Moffitt and her husband, Michael, both of whom also worked at the ...

How Food Stamps Subverted Democracy, Part 2

by James Bovard January 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Last month we saw how political demagoguery helped make hunger a major issue in American politics beginning in the late 1960s. After Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, liberals and their media allies largely declared victory over hunger. Carter was a humane progressive and there was no ...

It Is Congress That Needs to Be Limited

by Laurence M. Vance January 1, 2017

Standing near the Long Island Expressway (LIE) — with tractor-trailers zooming by — U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to swiftly finalize a proposed rule that would require electronic speed-limiting devices in large trucks, buses, and school buses that weigh more than 26,000 pounds. Said the senator in a press release, For ...

Money on the Table

by Richard W. Fulmer January 1, 2017

There’s an old economists’ joke about two university professors who are walking through the school’s cafeteria. The first professor, an engineer, points to an empty table and says, “Look, someone left a twenty-dollar bill.” The second professor, an economist, replies, “Nonsense. Someone would have already picked it up.” The point of the joke is that, in a free market, explanations ...

Freedom in Transactions

by Fredric Bastiat January 1, 2017

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — here are a million human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities that must enter tomorrow through the ...

End the Fed

by George Leef January 1, 2017

Who Needs the Fed? by John Tamny (Encounter Books, 2016); 224 pages. I really don’t like to start a review with a quibble, but in this instance, I must. My quibble is with the title of the book, which makes it seem as though it is aimed only at knocking out support for the Federal Reserve ...

Patriotism and Conscience: The Edward Snowden Affair

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2016

The Edward Snowden case provides a good example of how the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state has warped and perverted the morals, values, principles, and consciences of the American people. Snowden is the former NSA official who revealed the national-security establishment’s top-secret surveillance scheme to the American people and the rest of ...

How Food Stamps Subverted Democracy, Part 1

by James Bovard December 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The federal government is now feeding more than 100 million Americans. The vast increase in dependency fundamentally changes the relationship of Washington to the citizenry. The more Americans rely on handouts, the more difficult it becomes to roll back politicians’ power over those who do not. There was no ...

Workplace Smoking

by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2016

While making a brief trip recently to a place of business in a local outdoor mall in central Florida, I noticed that a new sign had been posted on the information board in the middle of one of the sidewalks: “Smoking in Workplaces Is Prohibited by Law.” The sign was gone the next week, replaced by an ad for ...

The New Deal, Part 2: Foreign Policy

by Joseph R. Stromberg December 1, 2016

Part 1 | Part 2 As noted in part 1, the New Deal was in serious political trouble by 1937. (See Frederic Sanborn, “Collapse of the New Deal,” in W.A. Williams, ed., Shaping of American Diplomacy, II.) Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace’s book New Frontiers (1934) was an early sign of the administration’s turn toward foreign markets as ...

The Tyranny of the Distance

by Matthew Harwood December 1, 2016

The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the Staff of The Intercept (Simon & Schuster, 2016); 256 pages. Last summer, the Obama administration finally made good on its promise to provide some transparency to its targeted killing program — well, sort of. On a Friday before the long July Fourth ...