Freedom Daily Archive

Why We Don’t Compromise, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 The crown jewel of the U.S. welfare state is Social Security. This federal program was adopted during the 1930s as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which consisted of an array of government programs that revolutionized America’s economic ...

Obama’s “Cynicism” Racketeering

by James Bovard August 1, 2015

Barack Obama captured the presidency in part because of his appeals to “hope and change.” But after more than six years in power, he is now spending far more time denouncing cynicism. As usual, the worst example of cynicism is citizens who fail to trust the government and the Supreme Leader. A presidency built on restoring faith in the ...

Does Empire Provide Global Public Goods?

by Joseph R. Stromberg August 1, 2015

Many of us have brushed up against public-goods theory once or twice, in an economics class or in various policy arguments. In the 1970s the concept took off in international-relations studies and we hear much these days about global public goods. This broadening of public-goods theory serves to license a broad array of state activities abroad, modeled on those ...

The Crisis of the Welfare State

by Clarence Carson August 1, 2015

The welfare state is more like a vast overlay of interventions on the market and economy than the displacement of it. They burden the economy, distort it, disrupt it, but they do not replace it. The interventions produce episodic disorders as well as crises. Some of these have been called by such varied names as recessions, inflation, economic stagnation, ...

Business Is No Business of the State

by George Leef August 1, 2015

Uncle Sam Can’t Count: A History of Failed Government Investments from Beaver Pelts to Green Energy by Burton W. Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom (Broadside Books, 2014), 239 pages. The day after the 2010 mid-term elections, the federal government quietly announced the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a “green energy” company that had been touted by Barack Obama as a ...

The War That Justified Other Wars

by Laurence M. Vance August 1, 2015

The Good War That Wasn’t — And Why It Matters: World War II’s Moral Legacy by Ted Grimsrud (Cascade Books, 2014), 286 pages. Even among some libertarians, World War II is viewed as the great exception. Although it was the most destructive thing to life, liberty, and property that the world has ever seen, World War II is ...

Why We Don’t Compromise, Part 3

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Suppose 100 percent of libertarians called for a reform, rather than a dismantling, of the welfare-warfare state way of life under which Americans today live. What would be the chances of achieving the free ...

The Mandatory Voting Panacea

by James Bovard July 1, 2015

Barack Obama suggested on March 18, 2015, that mandatory voting could cure some of the ills of American democracy. He said that compelling everyone to vote would “encourage more participation” — perhaps the same way that the specter of prison sentences encourages more people to pay taxes. While there are many good reasons to oppose mandatory voting, compulsory balloting ...

Build It and They Will Come

by Laurence M. Vance July 1, 2015

The city of Los Angeles is the country’s second-largest media market. Yet, the city has not had an NFL football team to call its own since the 1994 season, when the Rams and the Raiders each played their last games there. After beginning in Cleveland, the Rams called Los Angeles home from 1946 to 1994 before moving to St. ...

When the Supreme Court Stopped Economic Fascism in America

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2015

There was a time when the Supreme Court of the United States defended and upheld the constitutional protections for economic liberty in America. This year marks the 80th anniversary of one of the Supreme Court’s finest hours, when it overturned Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda for economic fascism in the United States. The trend towards bigger and ever-more-intrusive government, unfortunately, was not ...

The Inherent Criminality of Air Power

by Joseph R. Stromberg July 1, 2015

Constant American bombing of much of the world ought to raise questions about the morality (if any) of air power, even if few Americans bother to confront them. (Indeed, many moral theorists would rather apply their theorizing and “intuitions” to runaway trolley cars than to the real-world problem posed here.) Air power first showed its long-imagined potential in World War ...

The Case for Economic Freedom

by Benjamin A. Rogge July 1, 2015

I shall identify my brand of economics as that of economic freedom, and I shall define economic freedom as that set of economic arrangements that would exist in a society in which the government’s only function would be to prevent one man from using force or fraud against another — including within this, of course, the task of national ...