Daily Articles

What All the Democratic Presidential Candidates Have in Common

by Laurence M. Vance March 6, 2020

And then there were three. The Democratic National Convention will be held July 13-16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A record twenty-nine Democrats formally announced that they were seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Fourteen of them withdrew in 2019. Four of them withdrew in 2020 before the Iowa Democratic caucuses on February 3 (Cory Booker, Julian Castro, John Delaney, Marianne Williamson). Three ...

Liberalism Should Reject Welfare Statism

by Richard M. Ebeling March 5, 2020

Dislike for the personality and disagreement with the policies of Donald Trump have helped to revive a seemingly dead idea: socialism. This has placed friends and defenders of a free society on the defensive in having to make the positive case for free market liberalism. The economic and psychological shocks from the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the emotional distaste ...

So Much for Living the American Dream

by John W. Whitehead March 3, 2020

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist Let’s talk numbers, shall we? The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed ...

Achieving Freedom

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 2020

Achieving freedom necessarily depends on removing infringements on freedom. If all that we libertarians succeed in doing is modifying, reforming, or improving infringements on freedom, the most we will have achieved is an improvement in our condition as serfs living under America’s welfare-warfare-state way. That would be good. But it would not be freedom. Consider life in 1850 Alabama. Imagine ...

The Great College-Hunger Hoax

by James Bovard March 1, 2020

“Nearly half our college students are going hungry,” presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proclaimed in late November. Sanders’s tweet went viral, spurring more than 20,000 re-tweets and “likes.” Starving college students are a new rallying cry for social-justice warriors, spurring demands for new federal handouts and maybe even a college student-meal program modeled after school lunches. Some colleges are hyping hungry students ...

Are Americans Undertaxed?

by Laurence M. Vance March 1, 2020

According to the Tax Foundation, Tax Freedom Day “is the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for the year.” Tax Freedom Day “takes all federal, state, and local taxes and divides them by the nation’s income”; that is, “every dollar that is officially part of net national income ...

Liberty versus Political Paternalism

by Richard M. Ebeling March 1, 2020

In 1951, German free-market economist Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966), delivered a series of lectures in Cairo, Egypt, titled “The Problems of Economic Order.” Looking over the terrain of modern politics and policy thinking in the world at that time, he told his audience, If I were asked to say what appeared to me as one of the gravest features of our ...

Capitalism, Freedom, and Progress

by George Leef March 1, 2020

Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin Press, 2018); 496 pages. Almost everyone knows Alan Greenspan as the long-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve System. What far fewer know is that in his younger days, Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand and her anti-collectivist philosophy. ...

Triple Threat

by Laurence M. Vance February 26, 2020

What do minimum-wage laws, child-labor laws, and overtime-pay laws have in common other than that they originated in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938? The FLSA established a national minimum wage of 25¢ an hour, mandated time-and-a-half for overtime in certain jobs, prohibited most child labor, and established a 44-hour work week, which was lowered to 40 hours ...

The Technocrats Will Not Save Us

by Richard M. Ebeling February 25, 2020

Besides the certainty, as they say, of death and taxes, one other highly likely event will be an end to the general “good times” of relatively low price inflation and low unemployment in America. In other words, the United States will eventually experience worsening inflation at some point, as well as another general economic downturn. The question is, what ...

Gun-Toting Cops Endanger Students and Turn the Schools into Prisons

by John W. Whitehead February 20, 2020

"Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes Just when you thought the government couldn’t get any more tone-deaf about civil liberties and the growing need to ...

Happy 90th Birthday, Professor Israel Kirzner!

by Richard M. Ebeling February 19, 2020

Even in an era when modern medicine and technologies are adding to people’s lifetimes, along with the gains in general human economic betterment, it still stands as a notable event when someone marks their 90th birthday. On February 13th, renowned “Austrian” economist, Israel M. Kirzner, celebrated his reaching of that important milestone. It is difficult to imagine the revival of ...