Freedom Daily Archive

American Progressivism in Its Epoch

by Joseph R. Stromberg March 1, 2017

After 1865, rapid industrial consolidation and concentration of wealth, aggravated by the Panics of 1873 and 1893, provoked the Populist farmers’ movement, the labor strife characteristic of the mid-to-late 19th century, and the anti-trust movement. As historian Nancy Cohen has shown, the Liberal Republican reformers of the 1870s, disgusted by corruption under President Ulysses Grant, wanted to address the ...

Prohibition and the Socialist Ideal

by Ludwig von Mises March 1, 2017

Under the capitalistic system, the ultimate bosses are the consumers. The sovereign is not the state, it is the people. And the proof that they are the sovereign is borne out by the fact that they have the right to be foolish. This is the privilege of the sovereign. He has the right to make mistakes, no one can ...

The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Immediately after the bombing that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, Michael Moffitt began screaming, “DINA!” “Assassins!” The Washington, D.C., police who had arrived on the scene were mystified. Who the heck is Dina? they wondered. Moffitt was referring to the National Intelligence Directorate, an internal military-intelligence force within ...

How Food Stamps Subverted Democracy, Part 3

by James Bovard February 1, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Barack Obama took office in 2009 amidst the worst recession since the early 1980s. He had more faith in government spending than any White House occupant since Franklin Roosevelt. He speedily pushed through a stimulus bill through Congress that helped increase the number of food-stamp recipients from ...

The Marijuana Juggernaut Rolls On

by Laurence M. Vance February 1, 2017

Although most media coverage last November was on national elections — and especially the presidential election — most elections are actually for state and local offices. On the national level, voters choose two senators every six years, a president every four years, and a member of the House of Representative every two years. That is it. No one gets ...

The Gold Clause Cases

by David S. D'Amato February 1, 2017

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Legal Tender Cases in the late 1800s compelled the acceptance of otherwise worthless Treasury notes for all debts, removing from the individual’s rightful sphere of control a matter of serious financial import. The Gold Clause Cases, decided in 1935, continued to erode the liberal tradition of economic freedom, the further decline of which ...

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 ...