All Posts Tagged With: "liberty"

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 | | 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 | | 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 | | 0 comments | Continued

Prophets of Property

In 1800, fewer than 1 million people lived in London; a century later, well over 6 million. As the 20th century dawned, London had already been the most populous city on the planet for seven decades. Britain’s population as a whole soared from 8 million in 1800 to 40 million in 1900. In the previous [...]

1Jul2007 | | 0 comments | Continued

Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government

By Charles Fried Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

1Apr2007 | | 1 comment | Continued

Global Warming and the Layman

Global warming is a divisive issue. People are either believers or skeptics, with each side viewing the other with apprehension. I’ve sided firmly with the skeptics, but lately I have had a nagging concern. Like most people, I am not an atmospheric scientist. I have no firsthand way to evaluate a scientific claim for or [...]

8Dec2006 | | 0 comments | Continued

Eye on the Ball

Like clockwork, the New York Times has produced another page-one story purporting to show that living standards for many Americans have fallen, this time because wages in recent years have failed to keep up with inflation. This has been happening, write Times reporters Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt, despite rising productivity and even taking into [...]

1Sep2006 | | 1 comment | Continued

For Equality; Against Privilege

The freedom philosophy can be boiled down to two phrases: for equality, against privilege. Intuitively, this should sound uncontroversial. We just finished celebrating the Fourth of July, which commemorates the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson’s elegant statement of the freedom philosophy proclaims: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. [...]

7Jul2006 | | 2 comments | Continued

The Moral and Cultural Climate of Entrepreneurship

About 40 years ago I learned the following poem. It exemplifies a moral and cultural attitude about not only entrepreneurship, but also the moral purpose of human life itself. Written by Dean Alfange, it is known simply as “My Creed”: I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be [...]

1Mar2006 | | 0 comments | Continued

Basis of Liberty

In one of his fables Aesop said: “A horse and a stag,
feeding together in a rich meadow, began fighting
over which should have the best grass.The stag with
his sharp horns got the better of the horse. So the horse
asked the help of man. And man agreed, but suggested
that his help might be more effective if he were permitted
to ride the horse and guide him as he thought best.
So the horse permitted man to put a saddle on his back
and a bridle on his head.Thus they drove the stag from
the meadow. But when the horse asked man to remove
the bridle and saddle and set him free, man answered, ‘I
never before knew what a useful drudge you are. And
now that I have found what you are good for, you may
rest assured that I will keep you to it.’”

1Nov2005 | | 0 comments | Continued

Dialectics and Liberty

Ten years ago the first two books of what has become known as my “Dialectics and Liberty” trilogy were published. Those books—Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (SUNY Press) and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State Press)—together with the culminating work, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Penn State Press), constitute a defense of dialectical method [...]

1Sep2005 | | 3 comments | Continued

Freedom and Majority Rule

The publisher of the London Times came to this country a few years after World War I. A banquet in his honor was held in New York City, and at the appropriate time Lord Northcliffe rose to his feet to propose a toast. Prohibition was in effect, you will recall, and the beverage customarily drunk [...]

1Jun2005 | | 0 comments | Continued

There Is No Central Plan for Winning Liberty

People who become enthusiastic supporters of the freedom philosophy often ask how the case for individual liberty, free markets, and constitutionally limited government can be successfully spread across the land. How can it triumph over the prevailing system of governmental paternalism? In frustration and despair they point out that the interventionist-welfare state has its advocates [...]

1Jan2004 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Economic Foundation of Freedom

The late Howard Buffett was a U.S. representative from Nebraska (1943–1949 and 1951–1953). This article, condensed from a lecture at Midland College in Fremont, Nebraska, is reprinted from The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, December 1956. For more information on Buffett see Joseph R. Stromberg, “Howard Homan Buffett: Old Rightist Extraordinaire” at www.antiwar.com/stromberg/s042401.html. A clear understanding [...]

1Sep2003 | | 1 comment | Continued

An Inspiration for All Time

Most lovers of liberty want to be optimists. All that has to happen for liberty to be widely embraced is for people to open their minds and shed the baggage of the socialist impulse. Simple enough, right? No. It isn’t simple at all, and that’s why too many lovers of liberty fall into the pessimism [...]

1Dec2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

From Another America

[Editor's Note: On July 4, 1821, in honor of America's independence, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams addressed the U.S. House of Representatives. Such thoughts are sorely missed today.] . . . and now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world . . . should find their hearts disposed [...]

1Dec2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Man Who Didn’t “Grow” In Office

Seven miles north of Escanaba in Michi­gan’s Upper Peninsula sits a little town with a very big name. More than a hun­dred years after the death of the town’s namesake it’s unlikely that many of today’s 5,000 residents of Gladstone could tell you much about him. But in the nineteenth cen­tury and for a long [...]

1Apr2002 | | 5 comments | Continued
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