Freedom Daily Archive

A Most Radical Libertarian Book

by Laurence M. Vance March 1, 2015

Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion by Thomas E. Woods Jr. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2014), 338 pages. In his foreword to one of Tom Woods’s previous books, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul described him as “one of the libertarian movement’s brightest and most prolific scholars.” Paul mentions his endorsement in ...

Cruel Compassion

by George Leef March 1, 2015

Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed by Jason L. Riley (Encounter Books 2014), 407 pages. When he was asked, following the abolition of slavery, what the country should do with the Negro, Frederick Douglass issued this thunderous reply: “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing ...

Missing the Point about Flourishing

by Kevin Carson March 1, 2015

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change Movement by Edmund Phelps (Princeton University Press 2013), 392 pages. Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps evaluates economic systems with a view to how they promote human prosperity, or “flourishing”: engagement, meeting challenges, self-expression, and personal growth.... A person’s flourishing comes from the experience of the new: new situations, new problems, ...

The U.S. Executions of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, Part 5

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 In 1979 Joyce Horman filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against federal officials for the wrongful death of her husband, Charles. The case undoubtedly caused no small amount of consternation for the U.S. national-security state because a lawsuit ordinarily ...

Unjust Immigration Law Is Not Law

by Sheldon Richman February 1, 2015

As 2014 and the Democrats’ control of the Senate neared their conclusion, Barack Obama issued an executive order to defer deportation of five million people who lack government papers — mostly parents of children whom the government deems citizens or legal permanent residents. Under the order, most of those folks have received permission to work. Obama increased the number ...

Obamacare Racketeering and Intellectual Knavery

by James Bovard February 1, 2015

Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power. This axiom has been made stark with the controversy arising from a video of Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, in which he admits that the administration conned the American public and blames dumb voters for the flimflam. Gruber, an ...

Power and Knowledge: Socialist and Militarist Calculation Problems

by Joseph R. Stromberg February 1, 2015

Economist Ludwig von Mises argued (1920) that real prices arise only from exchanges of privately owned goods; having abolished such prices, socialist systems could never calculate rationally. Economist F.A. Hayek agreed with Mises that central planning would produce poverty and totalitarianism, but made the use of knowledge in society the central weakness of socialist calculation. In his view (1945), ...

The Real Story Remains Untold

by Kevin Carson February 1, 2015

Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin (Yale University Press 2013), 320 pages). Emma Griffin calls this a “People’s History of the Industrial Revolution,” and uses documentation of much the same kind as E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class — a work she explicitly frames her work as a ...

Children Learn More from Starfish than from Spiders

by Pauline Dixon February 1, 2015

The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning by Lant Pritchett (Center for Global Development 2013), 288 pages. This book, which indicts centralized state schooling in the developing world, engages you from beginning to end. Examples from Pritchett’s own experiences in India and his use of Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s spiders and starfish tropes to differentiate centralized from ...

Libertarians and Political Violence

by Jared Labell February 1, 2015

To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement by Robert H. Churchill (University of Michigan Press 2011), 384 pages. Discussions regarding the legitimate use of force are not limited to any single ideology. Perhaps the defining quality of any political movement vying for validity is its position on ...

The U.S. Executions of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, Part 4

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 During the 1960s, the U.S. government became obsessed with a man named Salvador Allende, a physician who had entered politics in Chile and repeatedly ran for president. Since Allende’s political and economic philosophy was communism, U.S. officials were determined to ...

Leonard P. Liggio (1933–2014)

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2015

I lost one of my favorite teachers in October, as did so many other libertarians, not to mention the freedom movement as a whole. Leonard P. Liggio, 81, died after a period of declining health. Leonard was a major influence on my worldview during the nearly 40 years I knew him. While I had not seen him much in ...