Daily Articles

Drug War Dementia

by James Bovard December 1, 1996

Politicians have found few better ways to frighten voters than with the specter of drugs. The government's war on drug users is annually jailing hundreds of thousands of Americans, ruining the neighborhoods of millions of other Americans, and setting precedents for expanded government power in other areas. Most of the drugs ...

Homegrown Tyranny Takes Root Slowly

by Don Hull December 1, 1996

Twentieth-century Americans have been conditioned to think of "tyranny" as something that happens to other people. And when it does happen, it happens all at once — like Hitler's attack on Poland, Soviet tanks crushing Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Iraq's invasion and plunder of Kuwait. ...

Book Review: Alien Wars

by Richard M. Ebeling December 1, 1996

Alien Wars: The Soviet Union’s Aggressions against the World, 1919 to 1989 by Gen. Oleg Sarin and Col. Lev Dvoretsky (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1996); 243 pages; $24.95. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes once explained the meaning of historical revisionism. Revisionism, he said, "implies an honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that may be a barrier to ...

The Guilding of the American Workforce

by James Bovard December 1, 1996

The American economy is degenerating into a guild system, as government doles out privileges to one group of self-proclaimed professionals after another. State licensing prohibits millions of Americans from practicing the occupation of their choice. Over eight hundred professions now require a government license to practice-from barbers to ...

The Relegalization of Drugs, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 1996

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 A member of the Christian Coalition recently telephoned me and said that she agreed with most of what The Future of Freedom Foundation stands for and wanted to support us. She then asked: "What is your organization's stand on drug legalization?" I responded: "We call for the total legalization of ...

Terrorism, Anti-Terrorism, and American Foreign Policy, Part 1

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1996

Part 1 | Part 2 On July 17, 1996, TWA Fight 800 exploded into a fireball off the southern coast of Long Island and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, just minutes after it took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. Two hundred and thirty human beings lost their lives. The anger and sorrow expressed by many Americans were understandable, ...

The Clinton Administration’s War on Privacy

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 1996

The Clinton administration, self-proclaimed champion of civil liberties and small government, is a big fraud. President Clinton's Department of Justice, it was recently revealed, is wiretapping more and more American citizens each year. It is increasing the number of federal wiretaps by more than 30 percent annually. What's more, the administration is bulking up the budgets of the FBI and ...

Stop Playing Games

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 1996

It's time for President Clinton to stop playing Saddam Hussein's tiresome game. How many times will the president prime the American people for military strikes on Iraq, only to go on television and call them off after Saddam has agreed to readmit the UN weapons inspectors? It's like a summer re-run! There ...

Drug War Dementia

by James Bovard November 1, 1996

H. L. Mencken observed in 1918: "A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion . . . as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them." In recent years, politicians have found few better ways to frighten voters than with the specter of drugs. The government's war on drug users is annually jailing hundreds ...

The Big Lie

by Vin Suprynowicz November 1, 1996

If the failed and unconstitutional "war on drugs" really needed another nail in its coffin, the 60-page report "Illicit Drugs and Crime" by Bruce L. Benson and David W. Rasmussen, professors of economics at Florida State University, should do the job. After studying crime rates in Florida, which poured vast resources into a beefed-up drug war in the years 1984-89, ...

Book Review: The Corrosion of Charity

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 1996

The Corrosion of Charity by Robert Whelan (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1996); 116 pages; £7.00. When the first suggestions were made for "downsizing" federal welfare spending after the 1994 Congressional elections, it was not surprising that various special-interest groups that either receive welfare payments in one form or another or that serve as the administrative or bureaucratic conduits for dispersing ...

What’s So Great about Democracy?

by Sheldon Richman October 1, 1996

In this election season, the time might be right for a heretical question: what's so great about democracy? To be sure, voting is better than violence for picking officeholders. But the real issue is what power those officeholders will have. Who rules is less important than which rules. In ...