Daily Articles

Obama: Dictator or Monarch?

by Wendy McElroy March 7, 2013

As part of his strategy of shifting blame for the sequester onto Republicans, President Obama told reporters that his hands were politically tied. He stated, “I am not a dictator, I’m the president.” In other words, he could not bypass Congress to unilaterally impose his will. And yet this is precisely what Obama has been doing for years. He has ...

More Reflections on the JFK Assassination

by Tim Kelly March 7, 2013

Despite the mounds of evidence indicating that President John F. Kennedy was the victim of an elaborate conspiracy organized by elements of the national-security state, there are many who still believe the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. A partial explanation for this could be ignorance. Many are simply not aware of the difficulties in the ...

Self-Defense and the Anti-Gun Mentality, Part 2

by Scott McPherson March 6, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 I’ve been having a friendly back-and-forth with a friend of mine over the issue of guns, self-defense, and the Second Amendment for several weeks now. After sending him my latest FFF commentary, he responded that he didn’t hate guns, as I had suggested. “I just want to live in a ...

Kill Anything That Moves

by Ken Sturzenacker March 6, 2013

If you were looking at a thousand men walking around on a football field, dressed very much alike, jeans and T-shirts with no markings, could you tell the Democrats from the Republicans, or the registered independents from the ones simply not registered to vote? Not likely. Neither could the smartest people in the Pentagon from the early 1960s through 1975 tell ...

The Libertarian Angle: March 4, 2013 (Video)

by Future of Freedom Foundation March 5, 2013

The Libertarian Angle features FFF vice president Sheldon Richman and president Jacob Hornberger. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

Timbuktu Not out of Reach of U.S. Troops

by Laurence M. Vance March 5, 2013

Although it is a real city north of the Niger River on edge of the Sahara Desert in the West African country of Mali, Timbuktu has long served as a metaphor for an exotic, mysterious, and distant land. To travel from “here to Timbuktu” suggests a long, arduous, and adventurous journey to a place far away. Timbuktu has both economic ...

TGIF: Sequestration and the Chimera of the Informed Voter

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2013

I spent too much time and effort this week trying to figure out the budget implications of sequestration. This made me wonder how many, well, normal people would be willing to do that. If the answer is “not many,” then in what sense can we talk about the “informed voter”? And if the “informed voter” is a chimera, how ...

Why Was JFK Assassinated?

by Tim Kelly March 1, 2013

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has joined the ranks of skeptics and “conspiracy theorists” who believe that a lone gunman was not solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy said his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, believed the Warren Commission Report was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship” “The evidence at this point I ...

Right-to-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2013

It’s not widely known, but an earlier generation of libertarians condemned so-called right-to-work laws as anti-market. For example, Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, compared right-to-work to anti-discrimination laws. Ayn Rand also opposed right-to-work laws. The Spring 1966 issue of the libertarian student-run journal New Individualist Review carried Prof. Hirschel Kasper’s article “What’s Wrong with Right-to-Work Laws.” NIR was ...

Police Tyranny, Slightly Curbed

by James Bovard March 1, 2013

On the night of March 3, 2010, University of Maryland students spilled out onto a main street in College Park, Maryland, to celebrate a victory by the school’s basketball team. Prince George’s County police had been primed for the event and waited nearby, dressed in riot gear and ready for action. John McKenna, a 21-year-old student, skipped up toward a ...

The Democratic Way of Killing: The President as Judge, Jury, and Executioner

by Doug Bandow March 1, 2013

One wonders whether Americans felt pride when they discovered that, according to the New York Times, their president was “a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” As a result, Barack Oba-ma believes that “he should take moral responsibility” for U.S. policy, including killing anyone and everyone seen as a terrorist threat to the United States. ...

Gun Control Is Violence

by Anthony Gregory March 1, 2013

Mohandas Gandhi, the greatest pacifist of the 20th century, is widely quoted as having said, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look back upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest.” Some have struggled to reconcile his pacifism with an opposition to disarmament. But there really is nothing to reconcile ...