Steve Horwitz Is Wrong, On Both Liberty and Methodology by Jacob G. Hornberger July 30, 2018 AUTHOR’S NOTE: On July 13, the Cato Institute published on its website libertarianism.org an article entitled “The Errors of Nostalgi-tarianism” by Steve Horwitz, a libertarian economics professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Horwitz’s article was a critique of a fundraising letter that I recently sent to supporters of The Future of Freedom Foundation requesting help with upgrading our website and with an outreach campaign that we are launching to find new libertarians. On July 23, I sent a response to Horwitz’s article to an editor at Cato, requesting that they share it with the readers of libertarianism.org. One of Cato's associate editors informed me that they would not post my response because, he said, it did not “meet libertarianism.org’s editorial standards.” He informed me that they would be open to reconsidering their decision if I met three conditions: (1) I revise my response to their satisfaction; (2) I delete the section of my response that explains FFF’s methodology for advancing liberty; ...
A Critique of My Fundraising Letter … From a Libertarian by Jacob G. Hornberger July 10, 2018 Every time I think I have seen it all, I discover that I haven’t. Yesterday, for the first time in the 28-year history of The Future of Freedom Foundation, I was critiqued for what I wrote in a fundraising letter that we just sent out to our supporters. In the letter, we are asking our supporters to help us augment our Internet presence, with the aim of finding more people who are attracted to FFF’s principled methodology for advancing liberty. The critique came in the form of a post on Facebook by libertarian professor Steve Horwitz, who teaches economics at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Here is Horwitz’s post: Quiz time. What's wrong with the argument below and how can it help explain the problems libertarians face in expanding our numbers? (The irony is that it's in an appeal to help this organization find more libertarians!) "My favorite period in U.S. history is the latter part of the 1800s. It wasn’t ...
Nonintervention: America’s Founding Foreign Policy by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 2018 On the Fourth of July, 1821, John Quincy Adams delivered one of the most remarkable speeches in U.S. history. Having gone down in history with the title “In Search of Monsters of Destroy,” Adams’s speech summarized the founding foreign policy of the United States. Adams pointed out that there are lots of bad things that happen around the world. Brutal dictatorships. Tyranny. Civil wars. Revolutions. Wars between nations. Poverty. Famines. Notwithstanding the death and destruction such “monsters” produced in foreign countries, however, the U.S. government would not go abroad to slay them. That was the founding foreign policy of the United States, a policy of nonintervention. That’s not to say that the United States was unwilling to offer any assistance to people who were suffering in foreign lands. Private Americans were free to offer their support, either personally or with financial donations. Equally important, the United States had a founding immigration policy of open borders, which meant that anyone who was willing ...
Do Immigrants Have the Right to Pursue Happiness? by Jacob G. Hornberger June 27, 2018 Next Wednesday, July 4, Americans will be celebrating the anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. An important question arises: How many Americans truly believe in the principles enunciated in the Declaration? The real significance of the American Revolution does not lie in the military battles between the English colonists and the English military. Those are interesting from a military-history ...
Immigration Enforcement Comes with Immigration Controls by Jacob G. Hornberger June 25, 2018 People are up in arms over President Trump’s decision to separate children from foreign parents who have entered the United States without official permission. The outrage has been so vocal and passionate that the president has been compelled to abandon the policy. What most everyone fails to notice, however, is that this is just one more measure, albeit an extremely ...
Why the Silence from Libertarian Immigration Controllers? by Jacob G. Hornberger June 5, 2018 Let’s recap some of the recent events in the federal government’s decades-long war on illegal immigrants, a war that is part and parcel of a system of immigration controls, which a small segment of conservative-oriented libertarians have supported in the past. A couple of months ago, a team of well-armed ICE agents raided a privately owned slaughterhouse in Tennessee. According ...
Karl Marx and Marxism at Two Hundred by Richard M. Ebeling May 7, 2018 German translation Greek translation A specter continues to haunt the world, the specter of Karl Marx. Two hundred years ago, on May 5, 1818, the father of twentieth century totalitarian communism, the guidebook writer of revolutionary mass-murdering dictatorship, and the inspirer of disastrous socialist central planning was born in Trier, Germany. Looking ...
Crimes of a Monster by John W. Whitehead April 19, 2018 “Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”— James Russell Lowell, 19th century American novelist Let us not mince words. We are living in an age of war profiteers. We are living in an age of scoundrels, liars, brutes and thugs. ...
Military Law and Order on the Border by Jacob G. Hornberger April 5, 2018 COME TO CHARLESTON! The Ron Paul Institute and The Future of Freedom Foundation are co-hosting a conference on U.S. foreign policy in Charleston, SC, on Sunday, April 29, from 1-5 pm. Speakers: Ron Paul, Dan McAdams, Richard Ebeling, and Jacob Hornberger, with special guest Congressman Mark Sanford. Details here. *** Among the long-held mantras of the conservative movement are ...
The Tyranny of Immigration Controls by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2018 Imagine the following conversation: John: Oh, my head hurts so bad. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Jack: If you stopped beating your head against that wall, your headache would go away. John: You libertarians are always so impractical and extreme. My headache has nothing to do with the fact that I am beating my head against this wall. I ...
Open Borders: Trade, Migration, Entrepreneurship, and Property by Ken Schoolland April 1, 2018 For good reason people ask how nations can become more prosperous. Usually the start is “Why is there poverty?” But the real question should be “Why is there wealth?” Poverty is the natural condition of all peoples of the world throughout history. Only in the past couple hundred years have we seen an astounding rise in the amount of ...
