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Freedom versus Medals of Freedom

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Though proximity to power is its own reward, rulers have long recognized the benefit of distributing trinkets to potential sycophants. From medieval times onwards, the English king was seen as the “fount of all honors.” The British government created endless ribbons, orders, and titles to attach individuals to the crown. Cash was sometimes necessary to clinch the allegiance. Samuel Johnson famously defined an honorary government pension as “pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.” The U.S. government long avoided the temptation to distribute nonmilitary awards by the bucket. However, in 1963 John F. Kennedy broadened a Medals of Freedom program begun by Harry Truman, specifying that the awards would be given for “exceptionally meritorious contributions to the security or national interest of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” Though the medal routinely went to politicians and government officials, giving it to artists, writers, movie stars, and ...

The EU Threat to Liberty

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“Each year the takes and spends more of our money without EU auditors being able to reliably confirm where much of this money has actually gone. The number of EU bureaucrats rises ever upwards. Ever more bureaucrats seem inevitably to lead to ever more rules and regulations, allowing the EU to expand its influence to almost every area of our lives…. Each time the EU produces one of its treaties, it seems to grab more power for itself, making our elected governments increasingly unable to oppose often costly EU legislation with which they may disagree. And whenever Europe’s citizens dare to vote against the EU’s growing power, the eurocrats derisively ignore public opinion and press on with their project regardless." Those words, from David Craig’s and Matthew Elliott’s 2009 book, The Great European Rip-Off: How the Corrupt, Wasteful EU Is Taking Control of Our Lives, represent an accurate British summary of both the process and results of half ...

Empire vs. Peace, Freedom, Morality, and Prosperity

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The justification that U.S. officials use for their assassination of people overseas, including American citizens, is that the people they’re killing are bent on killing U.S. forces. Thus, the justification is sort of a modified self-defense concept—they’re trying to kill us and so we’re assassinating them before they have a chance to kill us. Most mainstream commentators have come to passively accept this justification for the U.S. assassination program. You can especially see this when they comment on people killed who are considered “collateral damage.” They refer to those people as innocent civilians and to the targeted people as terrorists or insurgents. The notion is that the assassins were simply targeting the “bad guys” and, unfortunately, struck some innocent people in the process. But the fact is that people over there are trying to kill U.S. forces because U.S. forces are over there. They’re over there occupying Afghanistan. They’re rearming Iraq, after destroying the country and killing countless people. They have ...