Freedom and the Right of Self-Determination

The most guarded prerogative of every government is its legitimized monopoly over the use of force within its territorial jurisdiction. The second most important prerogative is its exclusive control over all its territory. By implication, governments therefore claim an exclusive right over the political, economic, and cultural destinies of the people under their control. If [...]

Book Reviews – October 2007

• Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag
  
  by Nicolas Werth Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
  
• Unwarranted Intrusions: The Case Against Government Intervention in the Marketplace
  by Martin Fridson Reviewed by Robert Batemarco
  
• Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt’s Legacy
  by Jim Powell Reviewed by John V. Denson
  
• Great Philanthropic Mistakes
  by Martin Morse Wooster Reviewed by George C. Leef
  
1Oct2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

A Tribute to a Polish Hero

One year ago the world lost a gifted science fiction writer and critic of totalitarianism when Poland’s Stanislaw Lem died in March 2006. Lem was best known internationally as author of the classic Solaris—twice adapted for the silver screen—but the majority of his fiction featured damning allegories against the suppression of the human spirit. Bruce [...]

The Function of The Freeman

On the positive side, of course, our function is to expound and apply our announced principles of traditional liberalism, voluntary cooperation, and individual freedom. On the negative side, it is to expose the errors of coercionism and collectivism of all degrees—of statism,“planning,” controlism, socialism, fascism, and communism. We seek, in other words, not only to [...]

If There Were No Capitalism

“If there were no God it would be necessary to invent
Him.”
Thus the witty and skeptical Voltaires phrase could also be applied to the economic system known as capitalism, often buried with much pomp and circumstance by communist, socialist, and assorted left-wing theorists, but so resilient that it will most probably outlive the memory of
most of its critics.

Private Enterprise Regained

Governor Bradford’s own history of the Plymouth Bay Colony over which he presided is a story that deserves to be far better known—particularly in an age that has acquired a mania for socialism and communism, regards them as peculiarly “progressive” and entirely new, and is sure that they represent “the wave of the future.” Most [...]

Estonia Moves to Liberty

Contributing editor Norman Barry (norman.barry@buckingham.ac.uk) is professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham in the U.K. He is the author of An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (St. Martin’s) and Business Ethics (Macmillan). We have read a lot about former Soviet regimes struggling to shake off the last remnants of communism. [...]

The Lessons of Another Tolstoy

Daniel Hager is a writer and consultant in Lansing, Michigan. This is the tale of another Tolstoy—not Leo, the nineteenth-century Russian count, novelist, and social reformer. This Russian came later, in the twentieth century, and was not of the nobility. His first name is obscure. His good friend Vladimir V. Tchernavin, who recounted his story, [...]

Book Reviews – December 2003

Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939–1941 by Albert L. Weeks Rowman & Littlefield • 2002 • 201 pages • $60 hardcover; 24.95 paperback Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling For most of the period since the end of  World War II the general interpretation about the role of the Soviet Union in the events leading up to the beginning of [...]