All Posts Tagged With: "free speech"
A Hidden Victory for Gun Rights
A significant gun-rights victory in the U.S. Supreme Court is being interpreted almost exclusively as a free-speech victory.
5Jul2011 | Wendy McElroy | 12 comments | ContinuedChina: Wealth but Not Freedom
When Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Washington earlier this year he received the gracious welcome and state dinner he did not get on his first visit in 2006. He also had some tough discussions on trade, foreign exchange, national security, and human rights. China can be proud of the rapid economic progress it has made [...]
21Apr2011 | James A. Dorn | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Day FEE Was Called before Congress
In 1950 Leonard E. Read faced one of the most difficult challenges of his life as he prepared to appear before a hostile congressional committee. His friend W. C. Mullendore warned that the committee was out to destroy him: “You should be under no illusion whatever but that the intention is to smear and not look [...]
24Feb2011 | David T. Beito | 2 comments | ContinuedIntellectual Property: Silly or Sinister?
Imagine a land recently seized from a foreign power where there is little law and a lot of gold. Since nature abhors a vacuum, prospectors quickly adopt the conventions of private property: Whoever is first to put four stakes in the ground is the proud owner of the land and any gold beneath. This would [...]
22Dec2010 | David K. Levine | 33 comments | ContinuedFree-Speech Clarity by California Courts
When kids get into complex arguments about who did what to whom, parents can usually sort through the miasma by focusing on a few key points. Whose toy is it? Which one of you threw the first punch? And likewise, almost every major debate in the political arena these days can be sorted out by [...]
24Nov2010 | Steven Greenhut | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Decline in Civil Liberties
On a flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in 1981, I sat beside a U.S. foreign service officer who had just finished a stint in Moscow. He told me that although he had enjoyed the job, he needed to get his family back to America because he wanted his children to grow up understanding what [...]
25Aug2010 | David R. Henderson | 6 comments | ContinuedYou Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Anti-Discrimination Laws
The chiseling away of constitutional limits on government power is a topic familiar to readers of these pages. For a long time the First Amendment’s prohibition against laws that infringe freedom of speech remained relatively untouched by people who would like to use state power to silence their opponents. But as David Bernstein, a George [...]
7Jul2010 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | ContinuedRizzo on the Supreme Court Ruling
I highly recommend this post by Mario Rizzo on the Supreme Court free-speech decision. Nobody has put it better. A tidbit: The terrible truth of the matter is that a large complex government is incompatible with political and personal freedom. It is not just the economic freedom in various sectors that is threatened by a [...]
24Jan2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedA Manifesto for Media Freedom
Americans are blessed with access to an unprecedented variety of media–not to mention ways in which information can be stored and the points of view and ownership interests represented. As documented in the brisk book A Manifesto for Media Freedom, this cornucopia of media options has led not to celebration of the marvelous diversity that [...]
23Sep2009 | Brian Doherty | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Gates Incident
Harvey Silverglate, a founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has an excellent article in Forbes on the arrest of Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates. For Silverglate — and I agree with him — this is entirely a free-speech matter. Gates was arrested exclusively for what he said to a policeman and [...]
29Jul2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedNovelist Gagged by Judge
The U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, two weeks ago issued a preliminary but indefinite injunction against publishing, distributing, or advertising of an “unauthorized sequel” to J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye titled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. The text of the preliminary injunction against Frederik Colting, writing as John [...]
15Jul2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedRestoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus
American colleges and universities are hothouses of hypocrisy, and the principal exhibit is that while their spokesmen talk endlessly about their commitment to openness, tolerance, critical thinking, diversity, and so on, many of them have adopted policies designed to stifle the expression of unpopular sentiments and empower certain groups to punish others for having the [...]
1Apr2006 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThis Is America?
I have long had an uneasy relationship with airport security. Before September 11, I resisted the demand that I produce a government-issued ID, believing that it smacked too much of the “Papers, please” of the former Soviet Union that Hollywood movies used to mock and we free Americans used to laugh at. I also used [...]
1Jul2002 | James R. Otteson | 12 comments | ContinuedUnfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform by Bradley A. Smith
Princeton University Press • 2001 • 304 pages • $26.95 Reviewed by John Samples Responding to Watergate, Congress a generation ago passed draconian restrictions on campaign spending and fundraising. The Supreme Court eventually struck down the spending limits, but affirmed contribution ceilings and the legality of the new agency empowered to oversee the regulatory regime, [...]
1Jun2002 | Bradley A. Smith | 0 comments | ContinuedBeijing Erodes Hong Kong’s Laissez Faire
While the rest of the world is debating the terms under which they might engage China, authorities in Beijing are busy trampling on its agreement with the British over Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. In the handover agreement, both parties agreed on Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, as a document that provided assurances [...]
1Mar2002 | Christopher Lingle | 0 comments | ContinuedFree to Be Stupid
America is a great country. What better evidence is there than the opportunity for people to say the stupidest, most witless things? Many people probably think that Washington, D.C., has a monopoly on idiocy. Not true. While the nation’s capital is often, indeed usually, void of common sense and good judgment, dumb comments sometimes rise [...]
1Mar2002 | Doug Bandow | 1 comment | ContinuedHow War Amplified Federal Power in the Twentieth Century
This article is reprinted from the July 1999 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. After surveying the Western world in the past six centuries, Bruce Porter concluded: “a government at war is a juggernaut of centralization determined to crush any internal opposition that impedes the mobilization of militarily vital resources. This centralizing tendency of [...]
1Dec2001 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | Continued-
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