All Posts Tagged With: "Founding Fathers"
The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power
Gene Healy relates a sad and disturbing “kids say the darndest things” anecdote in his new book. The story typifies an attitude toward government that Healy, senior editor at the Cato Institute, rightly identifies in his book’s title as The Cult of the Presidency. A little girl, on hearing that President Kennedy had been murdered [...]
2Mar2009 | Brian Doherty | 4 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Mistreating the Constitution?
If recent items in The Freeman are any indication, its writers take a rather dim view of the Constitution and the Framers thereof. While I couldn’t agree more regarding the people who wrote our federal compact (with a few exceptions), I must take issue with how the magazine treats the Constitution itself.
Sheldon Richman [...]
Torture and Liberty
Contributing editor James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, Terrorism and Tyranny, Lost Rights, and other books.
Is torture compatible with liberty?
Unfortunately, this is no longer a hypothetical question. Many Americans who claim to support individual freedom also favor permitting the government to torture suspected terrorists or other purported enemies of the United States.
This [...]
Slick Construction Under the Articles of Confederation
Writing lately on the Fourth Amendment, Professor Thomas Y. Davies decries the “originalism” practiced by certain Supreme Court justices and sundry legal commentators. On historical-hermeneutic grounds, he faults face-value originalism for missing “the shared, implicit assumptions that informed the public meaning” on which a given constitutional provision rested. Underlying the Fourth Amendment were common-law rules [...]
1Apr2008 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 1 comment | ContinuedGovernment Is Better than the Market at Producing Human Capital? It Just Ain’t So!
Invoking the Founding Fathers is always risky. We typically use the term as an amalgamation, as in “the Founders believed X.” But as a reading of even one semi-serious history of the American founding will show, their beliefs were divergent and contentious.
Many libertarians employ the term “Founders” as if to provide a degree of respectability [...]
Lee’s Legion of Lessons
The state is a harsh taskmaster with a taste for eating its own. A man may devote much of his life to its violence only to find himself on the receiving end one day. The Bible warns that “all those who take up the sword perish by the sword.” Yet distressing numbers of folks try [...]
1Sep2007 | Becky Akers | 0 comments | ContinuedDemocracy or Republic?
Walter Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University.
How often do we hear the claim that our nation is a democracy? Was a democratic form of government the vision of the Founders? As it turns out, the word democracy appears nowhere in the two most fundamental founding documents of [...]
Two Presidents, Two Philosophies, and Two Different Outcomes
In the White House, Wilson intended to be a strong president working with a “living Constitution.” He promoted the expanding of “beneficent” government into new areas. In his second year as president he concluded that shipping rates were too high, and he blessed his secretary of treasury’s plan to regulate overseas shipping rates and the companies doing the shipping.
1Jun2007 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | Continued“Deliberative Democracy” Dementia
James Bovard (jim@jimbovard.com) is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy Palgrave, 2006), Terrorism and Tyranny (Palgrave, 2006), and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Rights (St. Martin’s, 1994).
A specter is haunting America ’s politicians and professors—the spect(er of illegitimacy. The political-intellectual elite fear that millions of Americans will conclude that the current democracy is a [...]
Welfare for the Rich
Advocates of the free market—including those considered “right-wing” and “conservative”—believe it is wrong to violate property rights. Consequently, they oppose egalitarian measures to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Such “income redistribution” represents naked theft and epitomizes the Founding Fathers’ fears of unfettered democracy. At the same time, champions of laissez faire [...]
1Apr2007 | Robert Murphy | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Sovereign Presidency: Is This What the Framers Had in Mind?
American government under the Constitution was supposedly meant to work as follows: Congress, staying within delegated powers and the Bill of Rights, passes laws; the president executes the laws; and the courts sort out ensuing wrangles. This plan ran aground rather early—the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, for example—which raises at least two possibilities: 1) [...]
1Jan2007 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 2 comments | ContinuedConstitution Day
On September 17, 1787, 39 men signed the U.S. Constitution. Each year since 2004 we have celebrated Constitution Day as a result of legislation, fathered by Senator Robert Byrd, that requires federal agencies and every school that receives federal funds, including universities, to have some kind of program on the Constitution. I cannot think of [...]
1Nov2006 | Walter E.Williams | 3 comments | ContinuedCan We Tell Those Huddled Masses to Scram? Immigration and the Constitution
In 1873 some Presbyterians in Kentucky invited a young Canadian to be their pastor. Tensions in the border state were still high following the War of Southern Independence, and the congregants hoped that a neutral outsider could pacify folks not only within their own church but even across denominations.
Rev. A.B. Simpson succeeded so well that [...]
Nothing to Learn from the Antifederalists? It Just Ain’t So!
Joseph Stromberg is a historian and freelance writer.
According to Paul Greenberg, writing in the Washington Times in late January, the dreaded Antifederalists and their Articles of Confederation are making a comeback. In particular, these miscreants dare to question executive power. He writes with patriotic horror—a horror that assumes as self-evident a partisan reading of American [...]
Parting Company Is an Option
My last essay in The Freeman, “How Did We Get Here?” (March), provided clear evidence that Congress and the White House, as well as the courts, had vastly exceeded powers delegated to them by our Constitution. To have an appreciation for the magnitude of the usurpation, one need only read Federalist 45, where James Madison, [...]
1Jun2004 | Walter E. Williams | 1 comment | ContinuedBook Reviews – April 2003
Guns and Violence: The English Experience
by Joyce Lee Malcolm
Harvard University Press • 2002 • 352 pages • $28.00
Reviewed by Clayton Cramer
Joyce Lee Malcolm’s new book is not the masterpiece that her previous book, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, was. Still, there is much to commend, and much to be [...]
Monopoly Politics by James C. Miller III
Hoover Institution Press • 1999 • 157 pages • $17.95
The Founding Fathers were well aware that it takes more than ideas, as important as they are, to permit freedom to flourish. It takes institutions—private property, foremost, and political institutions that will protect rather than plunder it. Thus the political system they established was designed with [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
