All Posts Tagged With: "liberty"

Give Up? Are You Kidding?

We should not squander a second feeling bad for ourselves. This is a moment when our true character, the stuff we’re really made of, will show itself. If we retreat, that would tell me we were never really worthy of the battle in the first place. But if we resolve to let these tough times build character and rally our dispirited friends to new levels of dedication, we will look back on this occasion someday with pride at how we handled it.

17Jun2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 13 comments | Continued

From Good Samaritan to Robin Hood

The clamor from interventionists against inequality morphs into a clamor for a larger and larger state. This path leads to the loss of liberty and a distortion of both democracy and justice. It distorts democracy because, by attempting to solve inequality, it removes limits to power and expands the field of state action. It distorts justice because the only way to solve inequality politically is for the state to have the power to treat individuals unequally. Thus the struggle to eliminate inequality ends up destroying the most important form of equality for an open society: equality before the law.

10Jun2009 | Carlos Rodríguez Braun | 2 comments | Continued

Inclined to Liberty: The Futile Attempt to Suppress the Human Spirit

Some people, writes Louis Carabini, are naturally “inclined to liberty.” That is, their thoughts revolve around voluntary action to accomplish their objectives and solve problems. As a Freeman reader, you are probably such an individual. On the other hand, there are many others who are instinctively drawn to coercion to accomplish their objectives and solve [...]

21May2009 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

Crocodile Tears over AIG

If politicians spill any more crocodile tears over AIG , the EPA might have to declare Washington, D.C. a protected wetland. Sweep aside the phony expressions of “outrage” over AIG’s government-financed $165 million in bonuses (the information was in black and white) and ask yourself this: Who supplied the money? When politicians hand out other [...]

20Mar2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

What We Believe

The Foundation for Economic Education, publisher of this magazine since 1956, is now in its seventh decade, and I am now in my seventh month as its president. As we expand the outreach of our programs and publications, now is a good time to remind our readers who we are and what we believe in. [...]

2Mar2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 8 comments | Continued

Keynes Returns

Keynes is all the rage these days. Our House of Commons and Lords–sorry, House of Representatives and Senate–are brimming with Keynesians, and more than one news commentator has boldly declared (as we’ve heard before), “We’re all Keynesians now.” (An exception is Newsweek, whose cover blares, “We Are All Socialists Now,” but the difference, when you come [...]

13Feb2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Mill Gets it Right

I came across this wonderful John Stuart Mill quote by in a comment by Ray Mangum at Roderick Long’s great blog, The Austro-Athenian Empire: The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as [...]

9Feb2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

"Vive la liberte!"

Or so came the cry of the French Revolutionaries.  As anyone interested in history and liberty can attest, liberty requires a good deal of hard work.  I was especially struck by the relationship between liberty and work when reading French chef Jacques Pepin’s autobiography earlier this week.  The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen recounts [...]

23Jan2009 | Margaret Morgan | 2 comments | Continued

The Bastiat Solution

The election season, which — sigh — is only just beginning, makes me want to reread Frederic Bastiat’s The Law. It is the best antidote for the toxic demagoguery that issues forth from across the political spectrum. While the candidates are busy outcompeting one another in proposing new ways to spend our money (while promising [...]

29Aug2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Don't Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment!

Surely any champion of freedom wants to get rid of the income tax. And surely the way to really get rid of the income tax is to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Right? Wrong. Repealing the Sixteenth Amendment would be a waste of time because its disappearance would change nothing. Alas, Congress [...]

23May2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Hands Off Windfall Profits

You don't really have to like the oil companies to reject the windfall-profits tax. All you have to know is that if you tax something, you'll get less of it. No one can seriously dispute this piece of common sense. That leaves the strong suspicion that the motive for the tax is punitive: those companies [...]

9May2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Bailout Hypocrisy

Thud. That was the sound of the other shoe dropping. In response to severe problems in the credit markets, thanks to years of government intervention, the Federal Reserve–the government's counterfeiter and chief culprit in the current crisis–has opened its discount window to the investment banks. Interest rate: 2.5 percent. Until recently, only commercial banks could [...]

28Mar2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

The State Is Morally Hazardous to Your Health

It’s never been more important for advocates of individual liberty to emphasize that what is failing today is not the free market but the state. To claim otherwise, as so many people do, is to ignore generations of pervasive and deep-seated government interference with the marketplace. A brief article can’t possibly catalogue all the ways [...]

21Mar2008 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Health-Care Cons

The economist Joan Robinson (1903-1983) wrote, The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of readymade answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists. A better reason to study economics is to avoid being deceived by politicians; they are the far greater threat to life, liberty, [...]

29Feb2008 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

The Crazy Arithmetic of Voting

The hoopla over Super Tuesday reminded me of an essay I read long ago by Bruno Leoni (1913-1967), an Italian legal scholar and great champion of liberty. I’ve been meaning to discuss the many important themes in his book, Freedom and the Law (expanded third edition), and will surely return to it in the near [...]

8Feb2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Where Free-Market Economists Go Wrong

As the stimulus juggernaut steams through Congress, advocates of freedom would profit by studying the case closely. Try not to get depressed by the spectacle. Politics, alas, trumps economics. There’s nothing new in that, but we ought to learn some lessons and adjust our strategy accordingly. Newspaper accounts make clear that the President and people [...]

1Feb2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Class Struggle Rightly Conceived

Karl Marx is famous for drawing attention to the idea of class struggle. Yet remarkably in 1852, historian David Hart recounts, Marx wrote, “[A]s far as I am concerned, the credit for having discovered the existence and the conflict of classes in modern society does not belong to me. Bourgeois historians presented the historical development [...]

13Jul2007 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued
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