All Posts Tagged With: "Founding Fathers"

The True Meaning of Patriotism

Patriotism these days is like Christmas—lots of people caught up in a festive atmosphere replete with lights and spectacles. We hear reminders about “the true meaning” of Christmas—and we may even mutter a few guilt-ridden words to that effect ourselves—but each of us spends more time and thought in parties, gift-giving, and the other paraphernalia [...]

1Jun2003 | Lawrence W. Reed | 26 comments | Continued

Book 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, [...]

1Apr2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | Continued

The Constitution According to George Bush

White House lawyers have reportedly told President George W. Bush that he doesn’t need congressional authority to go to war. For political reasons, the President says he will seek “congressional support for U.S. action” in Iraq. But will he agree to be bound by a no vote? If not, his request is meaningless. The Constitution [...]

1Dec2002 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | Continued

Only Congress Can Declare War

The Bush administration has been looking at other potential military targets almost since the war in Afghanistan started. But should the President decide he wants to expand the war, he should get legislative approval. After September 11 Congress authorized President Bush to retaliate against any “nations, organization, or persons” he determined to be involved in [...]

1Oct2002 | Doug Bandow | 3 comments | Continued

Leviathan: America’s Secret Challenge

How helpful of physicist S. Fred Singer, head of the Washington area-based Science and Environmental Policy Project, to restore the idea of “hormesis.” Hormesis is the principle that things beneficial to life in low doses can be fatal in high doses. Singer mentions such things as alcohol, sunshine, iodine, sodium, iron, copper, cholesterol, and nuclear [...]

1Jul2002 | William H. Peterson | 2 comments | Continued

Chicken or Egg: Rights and Government

A theme of prominent contemporary political thinking is that our rights are gifts from government. Famous academics such as Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein have argued as much in their book, The Cost of Rights (W. W. Norton, 1999). As they put it, “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” (p. [...]

1Jul2002 | Tibor R. Machan | 1 comment | Continued

Freedom of Education: A Civil Liberty

Barry Loberfeld is a freelance writer. One of the most amazing things about the many organizations and individuals who designate themselves “civil libertarians” (with the ACLU, naturally, being the most emblematic) is the utter absence of educational liberty from their shared agenda. It’s not even a blip on their screen. Why? Because it’s not explicitly [...]

1Aug2001 | Barry Loberfeld | 2 comments | Continued

The Pledge versus the Oath

When George W. Bush became president last January, he struck a familiar pose. Raising his right hand before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath serves to remind us that the United States is a constitutional republic with a federal [...]

1May2001 | James Peron | 6 comments | Continued

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 [...]

1Feb2001 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

Vital Remnants: America’s Founding and the Western Tradition

This book is a collection of essays that had their genesis in lectures delivered at a week-long conference on “America and the Western Tradition,” in Colonial Williamsburg in 1998. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) brought together some of the best students and college faculty in the country to explore the Western roots of the American [...]

1Dec2000 | Wesley Allen Riddle | 1 comment | Continued

The Colonial Origins of American Liberty

Thomas Woods, Jr., is a professor of history at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, New York. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the January 2000 Ludwig von Mises Institute conference, “The History of Liberty,” and appeared on Mises.org. It has recently been suggested that we cease to use the term “Founders” to [...]

1Sep2000 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

Chosen Words Have Meaning

To the Editor: I have enjoyed and appreciated Wendy McElroy’s articles in the Ideas on Liberty for quite some time, but I must take issue with her fundamental premise in “Constitutional Intentions” (June 2000). Let me quote the first paragraph in order to refer more clearly to it: “A question frequently arises in disputes about [...]

1Sep2000 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | Continued

Constitutional Intentions

A question frequently arises in disputes about how to interpret the U.S. Constitution: What was the intention of those who framed the document? This question contains an invalid assumption. It assumes that those who drafted the Constitution at the 1787 convention and those involved in the subsequent debates were of one mind and intent. In [...]

1Jun2000 | Wendy McElroy | 2 comments | Continued

Regulation, the Constitution, and the Economy: The Regulatory Road to Serfdom by James Rolph Edwards

University Press of America • 1998 • 256 pages • $52.00 cloth; $32.50 paperback James Rolph Edwards invokes a Hayekian legacy in the title of his book, Regulation, the Constitution, and the Economy: The Regulatory Road to Serfdom. In light of Hayek’s belief that freedom cannot endure unless every generation restates and reemphasizes its value, [...]

1Feb2000 | Royce Van Tassell | 0 comments | Continued

The End of Liberty

Stephan Gohmann is a professor of economics at the University of Louisville. Have you checked the coins in your pocket lately? If you see a shiny coin with the image of a man on a galloping horse, be advised that it’s not an arcade token but a real U.S. quarter dollar. This new coin is [...]

1Nov1999 | Stephan F. Gohmann | 1 comment | Continued

School-to-Work: A Large Step Down the Road to Serfdom

Gary Wolfram is the George Munson Professor of Political Economy at Hillsdale College. It’s been five years since Congress enacted the “School-to-Work Opportunities Act.” School-to-Work is a federal program that ostensibly is designed to improve the work skills of children in the nation’s government schools. The theory is that our education system should prepare children [...]

1Sep1999 | Gary Wolfram | 0 comments | Continued

Paranoia About Paranoia in American Politics

Since the 1960s modern “liberals” have often sought to stigmatize those who distrust government as paranoid. This “diagnosis” was first popularized by Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970). His widely read book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in 1965, presented a thesis that is routinely invoked to delegitimize any criticism of government [...]

1Aug1999 | James Bovard | 0 comments | Continued
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