Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy

For decades the prevailing view among historians has been that because the American people were too stubborn and stupid to concern themselves with foreign wars, President Franklin Roosevelt had to lie for a noble cause—namely, waging war against imperialist Japan and Nazi Germany. Seldom have historians asked themselves why Americans would want to stay out [...]

Herbert Hoover

William E. Leuchtenburg is among the last surviving literary lions who played a major role shaping the reputation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His book Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963) stood out amidst the postwar deluge of worshipful works about FDR, including those by James MacGregor Burns, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, [...]

Why the Government Fails to Maintain Anything

As the mad scramble to pass President Obama’s stimulus bill reminded us, politicians love to start new government programs. They gain things they can brag about during their reelection campaigns. But there’s little to be gained by maintaining programs somebody else started. No surprise, then, that in budget battles, maintenance tends to be under-funded. Moreover, [...]

Edward Coke: Common Law Protection for Liberty

Why were civil liberties first secured in England? One important reason was the development of common law principles and precedents independent of a ruler. Edward Coke (pronounced “Cook”) was more responsible for this than anybody else. Murray N. Rothbard called him a “great early seventeenth century liberal.” Winston S. Churchill observed that “His knowledge of [...]

Lafayette: Hero of Two Worlds

The freedom fighter Marquis de Lafayette changed history. He helped defeat the British at Yorktown, winning American independence. In France, he helped topple two kings and an emperor. Jean-Antoine Houdon, the great eighteenth-century sculptor who created busts of many great heroes, dubbed Lafayette “the apostle and defender of liberty in the two worlds.”

A Salute to Bettina Bien Greaves

Bettina Bien Greaves is an extraordinary, unsung resource for liberty. Now FEE’s Resident Scholar, a FEE Trustee, Freeman Contributing Editor, and two-time Guest Editor, she has done so many things for so many people for so long, it’s past time to publicly acknowledge her myriad contributions. If you ask Bettina, she says she has only [...]

Frederic Bastiat, Ingenious Champion for Liberty and Peace

Frederic Bastiat ranks among the most spirited defenders of economic freedom and international peace.

Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek called Bastiat a publicist of genius. The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises saluted Bastiat’s immortal contributions. Best-selling economics journalist Henry Hazlitt marveled at Bastiat’s uncanny clairvoyance. Said intellectual historian Murray N. Rothbard: Bastiat was indeed a lucid and superb writer, whose brilliant and witty essays and fables to this day are remarkable and devastating demolitions of protectionism and of all forms of government subsidy and control.

Albert Jay Nock: A Gifted Pen for Radical Individualism

American individualism had virtually died out by the time Mark Twain was buried in 1910. Progressive intellectuals promoted collectivism. Progressive jurists like Oliver Wendell Holmes hammered constitutional restraints as an inconvenient obstacle to expanding government power, supposedly the cure for every social problem.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Who Gave Natural Law to the Modern World

He insisted on the primacy of moral standards over government laws. These standards became known as natural law. Above all, Cicero declared, government is morally obliged to protect human life and private property. When government runs amok, people have a right to rebel—Cicero honored daring individuals who helped overthrow tyrants.