Great Times Spreading Liberty in Milwaukee by Jacob G. Hornberger October 24, 2019 Part of my spring and summer was spent in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, spreading ideas on liberty. It started out with an invitation to speak before a group called the Wisconsin Forum, whose origins go back decades. It is a private group composed of libertarians and conservatives who invite speakers to address the club on issues relating to liberty. I was invited to speak on “The Case for Open Borders.” But before I addressed the Wisconsin Forum, I received invitations to speak on the same subject to students at two different schools in Milwaukee: Brookfield Academy and the Academy of Excellence. Brookfield is one of the finest private schools in Wisconsin. Among the founders was a man named Bill Law, who was president of a Milwaukee company named Cudahy Tanning Company. I first encountered Bill when I attended a summer seminar at The ...
Monsters and U.S. Foreign Policy by Laurence M. Vance October 1, 2019 It looks like the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity will be having some competition. The formation of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft was recently announced. The think tank gets its name from John Quincy Adams. According to the organization’s website, The Quincy Institute promotes ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace. The foreign policy of the United States has become detached from any defensible conception of U.S. interests and from a decent respect for the rights and dignity of humankind. Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in itself. Moreover, much of the foreign policy community in Washington has succumbed to intellectual lethargy and dysfunction. It suppresses or avoids serious debate and fails to hold policymakers and commentators accountable for disastrous policies. It has forfeited the confidence of the American public. ...
The Case for Open Immigration by Jacob G. Hornberger September 1, 2019 Every American living today has lived his entire life under an immigration crisis. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. America’s system of immigration controls is based on the concept of central planning, which is a core feature of socialism, which, as anyone from North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela will attest, always produces crises. Government officials centrally plan the movements of millions of people, mostly in a complex international labor market. The government’s plans involve allocations of immigrants that will be allowed entry from certain countries and designate the qualifications and types of skills they are required to possess for entry into the United States. It cannot be done. Even if the government put the top 100 immigration experts into a room that contained the 10 most powerful computers in the world and came up with what the mainstream media call a “comprehensive immigration-reform plan,” it would not work. There is a simple reason for that: Central planning is an inherently defective system, ...
Radio Hypocrisy by Laurence M. Vance August 21, 2019 During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe (RFE) broadcast news, information, and U.S. government propaganda to Soviet satellite countries and Radio Liberty (RL) did the same to the Soviet Union. But although the Cold War has been over for 30 years, RFE/RL is still operating. According to the RFE/RL website, RFE/RL journalists report the news in 22 ...
Israeli and U.S. Destruction of Freedom of Travel by Jacob G. Hornberger August 16, 2019 Proponents of trade and immigration controls oftentimes forget that there is another factor that comes with their socialist immigration system, that is, in addition to the death, suffering, police state, and destruction of the rights of economic liberty, liberty of contract, freedom of association, and private ownership of property. That factor is the destruction of freedom of ...
Should Libertarians Support Trump’s Immigration Raids? by Jacob G. Hornberger August 12, 2019 Libertarian supporters of immigration controls are remaining conspicuously silent about President Trump’s latest immigration raids. What’s up with that? Wouldn’t you think that people who support America’s system of immigration controls would be praising such raids? Actually, it’s a good thing such libertarians are remaining silent, just as they remain silent about the other enforcement measures ...
Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric and the El Paso Killings by Jacob G. Hornberger August 8, 2019 Leftists are tripping over themselves in their attempt to blame President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric for one of the nation’s latest killing sprees, the one in El Paso, where the killer posted an online screed complaining about the “invasion” of illegal immigrants. Of course, the left is having a more difficult time trying to tie Trump’s rhetoric to the simultaneous ...
Adhering to Principle to Achieve Liberty, Part 2 by Jacob G. Hornberger August 1, 2019 Part 1 | Part 2 In 1990, the first year of The Future of Freedom Foundation’s existence, I wrote an article entitled “Letting Go of Socialism” (www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/letting-socialism) in which I criticized the idea of school vouchers. I pointed out that vouchers were simply another socialist program in which government forcibly takes money from one group of people and gives ...
Open Borders Are Compatible With a Welfare State by Jacob G. Hornberger July 31, 2019 For some time now, there has been a conservative faction within the libertarian movement that has advocated that libertarians abandon their position in favor of open borders and instead join up with conservatives and progressives in support of government-controlled borders. In doing so, these conservative-oriented libertarians always fail to address one of the principal costs of abandoning libertarian principle on ...
Immigration Control Follies by Jacob G. Hornberger July 30, 2019 Sometimes the debate over the decades-long immigration crisis becomes amusing. In a July 26 editorial entitled “Trump’s Wall Gets America Nowhere on Border Security,” which takes the Trump administration to task for its cruel, brutal, destructive, and failed immigration enforcement measures, the New York Times writes, “There must be a way to house the migrants, ...
Conservative Nationalism Is Not About Liberty by Richard M. Ebeling July 23, 2019 For almost 200 years there have been two political movements in opposition to the liberal political philosophy of individual liberty, free markets, and constitutionally limited government: socialism and nationalism. They both have called for reducing the individual to a cog in the machine serving a wider collectivist good. Given that socialism has been making a political comeback, it is ...
Immigration Hypocrisy, Left and Right by Jacob G. Hornberger July 19, 2019 You couldn’t find a better example of hypocrisy among both conservatives and liberals (i.e., progressives, leftists) than in the area on immigration. Conservatives love to wrap themselves in free-market, capitalist lingo. They tell us that they are fierce opponents of socialism. Their favorite mantra is “free enterprise, private property, and limited government.” You might even ...
