Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms Fraud by James Bovard February 22, 2011 President Obama has succeeded in seizing new power over health care and other swaths of American lives in part because previous presidents muddied Americans’ understanding of freedom. Most of the past century’s debates over the meaning of liberty have featured one politician after another who promised people true freedom, if only they would submit to increased government power. In the ...
Making War at Home by Catherine Lutz February 20, 2011 I could see its seams as the huge warplane slowly lumbered overhead toward its twilight landing at a military complex near Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was mere feet above the flapping laundry and unlandscaped grounds of a trailer park. A few miles further away, people living in the houses of another, greener area of Fayetteville straightened wall hangings set ...
Auberon Herbert, Part 1 by Wendy McElroy February 18, 2011 Part 1 | Part 2 In his periodical Liberty, (May 23, 1885), the quintessential American individualist-anarchist Benjamin Tucker wrote of his British counterpart Auberon Herbert, “I know of no more inspiring spectacle in England than that of this man of exceptionally high social position doing battle almost single-handed with the giant monster, government, and showing in it a mental ...
A Dictionary of Libertarianism by Laurence M. Vance February 15, 2011 Libertarianism, from A to Z by Jeffrey A. Miron (New York: Basic Books, 2010); 198 pages. More and more Americans are coming to realize that the liberal/conservative paradigm is deeply flawed. Disillusionment with Washington is at an all-time high. The old adage that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties has never seemed more ...
Thank Goodness for WikiLeaks by Sheldon Richman January 1, 2011 WikiLeaks has released close to 400,000 U.S. classified military documents relating to the Iraq war. The American people, the theoretical masters of the government, were not supposed to see them. So, just as it was when the website released 77,000 documents on the Afghan war in August, WikiLeaks was roundly condemned. Unnamed officials in the Obama administration are reported ...
Misdefining Liberty by James Bovard January 1, 2011 The definitions of liberty devised in ivory towers and elsewhere have a profound impact on political and judicial thinking. Regardless of how wrongheaded some concepts of liberty prevalent early last century may now appear, America’s legal structure is now based on those ideas. And that legal structure continues binding today’s citizens to the intellectual follies of previous generations of ...
Forget Reform by Bart Frazier January 1, 2011 Reforming federal programs that have bestowed upon Americans a multitude of problems would seem to be a good idea, but it’s not. The problem is not only that the programs will never work no matter how much they are reformed, but also that what the programs do falls outside the legitimate functions of government. The programs need to be ...
Where Is the Tea Party Revolution on Foreign Policy? by Stephen Kinzer January 1, 2011 America’s latest populist movement, which reaches back to revolutionary history by calling itself the “Tea Party,” helped shape the remarkable results of last November’s midterm election. Some dare to hope that candidates elected in that political uprising might help arrest America’s alarming decline. Others see the uprising as no more than a cover for the corporate power that lay ...
How Will the Empire End? by Anthony Gregory January 1, 2011 Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope by Chalmers Johnson (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); 212 pages. Most Americans would very likely deny that their government is a global empire, horribly destructive to national security, liberty, and wealth. But whatever we call this U.S. system of ubiquitous military bases, satellite regimes throughout the world, ever-growing “defense” budgets, and an ...
Natural Rights, the Declaration, and the Constitution, Part 3 by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2010 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The Bill of Rights should actually have been called the Bill of Prohibitions because it actually doesn’t give any rights to anyone. Instead, it expressly prohibits the federal government from infringing the fundamental rights of the people. Our American ancestors understood that people’s rights don’t come from the government or from ...
The Neoconservative Obama Administration by Sheldon Richman December 1, 2010 President Barack Obama was far from candid when he announced the end of combat operations in Iraq in August — 50,000 troops and a large number of mercenaries remain — but in his speech he did nothing to hide his neoconservative outlook on the American empire. This was not lost on leading neoconservatives, who tend to prefer Republicans. William Kristol, ...
Defining Coercion Down by James Bovard December 1, 2010 Coercion is the essence of government in the same way that profit is the essence of private businesses. The state can impose new prohibitions and restrictions, create new penalties, or impose taxes in order to finance benefits. It is misleading to conceive of politicians as offering both carrots and sticks: Government must first use a stick to commandeer the ...