Daily Articles

The Jacob Hornberger Show – November 11, 2012

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 13, 2012

The Jacob Hornberger Show broadcasts live every Sunday night at 6:30 pm EST. Visit FFF's Ustream Channel to watch the show live.  

Supersized Fries, Downsized Jobs

by Wendy McElroy November 12, 2012

On November 2 the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that America added 171,000 jobs in October. President Barack Obama lost no time in proclaiming to crowds, “Today we learned that our companies have created more jobs in October than in any of the last five months.” Meanwhile his unsuccessful presidential challenger, Mitt Romney, called the jobs report ...

Conservative Judges Demolish the False Legitimacy of Guantánamo’s Terror Trials

by Andy Worthington November 9, 2012

When is a war crime not a war crime? When it is invented by the executive branch and Congress and implemented for six years until a profoundly conservative appeals court strikes it down. The invented war crime is “providing material support to terrorism.” On October 16 a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, threw out the conviction ...

The Election’s Unanswered Question

by Sheldon Richman November 8, 2012

Thank goodness the tedious presidential campaign is over. It was enough to put a caffeine freak into a coma. If all you cared about was the horse race, you missed how anemic the past year was. Rhetoric aside, the differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were virtually inconsequential; big government was never in doubt. That being the case, ...

Republicans Miss the Point on Tax Cuts

by Laurence M. Vance November 6, 2012

At the same time Republicans are adamant that more people should pay income taxes and lukewarm on the idea that Social Security taxes should be cut, they are also calling for the so-called Bush tax cuts to be extended, individual marginal income-tax rates to be lowered, the corporate income-tax rate to be lowered, and certain taxes to ...

Life without FEMA?

by Sheldon Richman November 2, 2012

Advocates of big government never miss a chance to capitalize on a natural disaster. Even before the storm has passed, they will boast that without activist government, recovery would be impossible. Peddlers of this line ask us to imagine what life would be like today — in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy — without FEMA and the state and ...

Legal Earthquake Rocks the Scientific Community

by Wendy McElroy November 2, 2012

On October 22, an Italian court found six seismologists and one government official guilty of multiple involuntary manslaughter for failing to accurately predict an earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, which killed around 300 people. The trial lasted from September 2011 until October 2012, but it took a judge only a little over 4 hours to decide it. Each man ...

Sheldon Richman Joins FFF Full-Time

by Future of Freedom Foundation November 1, 2012

The Future of Freedom Foundation is pleased to announce that Sheldon Richman, who has served as a part-time senior fellow for FFF for many years, has joined the foundation as vice-president and editor of FFF’s monthly journal, Future of Freedom. “We are really excited to have Sheldon join us as a full-time member of FFF’s staff,” said Jacob Hornberger, the ...

Medicare Is Doomed

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2012

When Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to “end Medicare as we know it,” they are right. Of course ending Medicare as we know it is not the same as ending Medicare. What Democrats fail to point out is that “Medicare as we know it” is no longer an option for anyone. They too will end “Medicare as we know ...

The Lingering Curse of “Bush Freedom”

by James Bovard November 1, 2012

It has been almost four years since George W. Bush’s presidency ended. Unfortunately, it increasingly appears that Bush did permanent damage to this nation’s political vocabulary and understanding. Rather than repeal his worst precedents, Barack Obama used them as launch pads for his own abuses. And the scant discussion of Obama’s power grabs in this fall’s presidential campaigns illustrate ...

The Misplaced Fear of “Monopoly”

by Thomas E. Woods Jr. November 1, 2012

Those of us who get drawn, often against our better judgment, into Internet debates soon discover that the case against the market economy in the popular mind boils down to a few major claims. Here I intend to dissect one of them: under the unhampered market we’d be at the mercy of vicious monopolists. This fear can be attributed in ...

Limits on the Right to Exit: The New Slavery

by Ridgway K. Foley Jr. November 1, 2012

The federal fascists respond with threats and vilification when a few knowledgeable citizens renounce their American citizenship and move — with capital and assets that they have accumulated by honest endeavor — to a more hospitable state, one that does not mulct them as rigorously by the theft benignly called taxation. The government bullies, who threaten to follow the ...