The Politics of Freedom

Thomas Paine said that freedom had been hunted and harassed around the world and that only America offered it a home. Today, it seems to many Americans that freedom is on the run here, too. War and taxes, the nanny state and the Patriot Act, unsustainable entitlements—all threaten the liberty we enjoy as Americans. But [...]

Free to Migrate

No matter what the advocates of free immigration say about the natural individual right to move without government permission, many people remain unconvinced because they expect theory and practice to diverge. Open borders may be good in the abstract, we're told, but the theory doesn't reflect what happens in the real world. To begin, we ought to be suspicious of any claim that a good theory and practice part ways. More . . .

A NEW article by Sheldon Richman

Growing Up Means Resisting the Statist Impulse

A few months ago, I walked into a restaurant in Naples, Fla., and said “A nonsmoking table for two, please.” The greeter replied, “No problem. All restaurants in Florida are nonsmoking by law. Follow me.” For a brief moment as we walked to our table, I thought to myself: “Good. No chance of even a [...]

Moral Alchemy

The welfare state is a political-legal environment in which the government goes beyond protecting life, liberty, and property against physical aggression and fraud—the traditional classical-liberal functions—ostensibly to assure a broader conception of welfare, such as health, retirement security, employment security, education, consumer and worker safety, and so on. We should pay close attention to words. [...]

The Open-Endedness of Knowledge

I intend to explore in this article some aspects of the uniqueness which is FEE, and to express my fervent hope and confidence that such uniqueness will continue to permeate every nook and cranny of FEE’s activities in the years to come. I will begin by noting two related but separate paradoxes that have over [...]

Capital Letters

Free Martha? To the Editor: I was surprised to read January’s “Perspective” on Martha Stewart. If she lied when she said “she had a standing order to sell the stock if the price went below $60.00,” and that statement was made in the context of a criminal investigation, she could be guilty of obstruction of [...]

Seeing the World Plain

Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author and editor of several books. Washington, D.C., is filled with professions of good intentions by politicians and bureaucrats as they steadily strip away Americans’ liberty and money. The political class uses even the most serious social problem to [...]

Superheroes and the Fight for Liberty

In recent times, popular culture has not exactly been a bastion of principled thought and philosophy, particularly when viewed from conservative or libertarian perspectives. Television, movies, and music, along with countless novels, have been infiltrated either by big-government leftism or a pervasive nihilism. Is there a pop-culture genre that might be considered an exception? Well, [...]

The Economic Advantages of a Commitment to Liberty

In my last column I discussed the bias toward excessive government caused by the dead-weight costs of taxation. Because these costs go unseen, while the benefits from government spending are readily apparent, government expands beyond reasonable limits.