All Posts Tagged With: "limited government"
The Supreme Court and the End of Limited Government
The Supreme Court ruling permitting governments
forcibly to transfer property through eminent
domain from one private party to another
for the sake of economic development did not come out
of the blue. Although the Takings Clause in the Fifth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifies “nor shall
private property be taken for public use without just
compensation,” the “Court long ago rejected any literal
requirement that condemned property be put into use
for the general public” (Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff,
1984, cited in the current case, Kelo v. City of New
London).
Presidents and Poverty
Conventional wisdom holds that fighting poverty
has only lately been a concern of American
presidents, and that before Franklin Roosevelt
it was hardly a concern at all. This stubborn error
persists.
I’d Push the Button—To Establish Freedom Right Now
In April 1946, a month after the late Leonard E. Read established the Foundation for Economic Education, he gave a talk in Detroit called “I’d Push the Button.” He said that if there were a button on the podium that would immediately abolish all controls and regulations on the U.S. economy, he would push it. [...]
1Jun2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Not More Liberty?
Russell Roberts holds the Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center and is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance. There are two extreme views of American government and the political process. One is that [...]
1Dec2004 | Russell Roberts | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – May 2003
The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot Basic Books • 2002 • 448 pages • $30.00 hardcover; $16.00 paperback Reviewed by Ivan Eland Max Boot provides a thorough and relatively candid history of the U.S. government’s involvement in small wars. The section of the book on [...]
1May2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedRobert Nozick, Philosopher of Liberty
Twenty-eight years ago a Harvard philosophy professor named Robert Nozick did something unthinkable in polite intellectual society: he published a book defending libertarianism. In 1974 libertarian ideas had virtually no presence within the academic establishment. Free-market economists F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman had not yet won their Nobel prizes (Hayek’s would come later that [...]
1Sep2002 | Roderick T. Long | 27 comments | ContinuedThe 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 | Lawrence W. Reed | 5 comments | ContinuedNullification: The Jeffersonian Brake on Government
Thinkers in the classical-liberal tradition, to the extent that they support a coercive state at all, speak routinely of the importance of keeping government strictly limited. To that end, the United States has a written Constitution, which enumerates the relatively brief list of tasks entrusted to the federal government and whose Tenth Amendment makes clear [...]
1Mar2002 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedWhy America Gets Fleeced
One of the occasional features on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw is “The Fleecing of America,” a series of segments exposing cases of waste and fraud that victimize individuals or the general public. Some of the examples are swindles or scams by private companies or individuals, and the obvious solution is to exercise more [...]
1Feb2002 | Melvin D. Barger | 0 comments | ContinuedSimplistic Anwers
We’ve all been warned to beware of people who think that they have all the answers—who believe themselves to hold the key to Truth—who have a simplistic formula alleged to be the solution to all of the world’s problems. It’s wise to heed this warning, for regrettably, people with simplistic answers are not uncommon and [...]
1Oct2001 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Rule of Law and Freedom in Emerging Democracies: A Madisonian Perspective
James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute. The collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe, and the fall of the Soviet Union two years later, have increased the number of democracies in the world to a total of 120. Of those, however, only 85 are classified as [...]
1Aug2001 | James A. Dorn | 0 comments | ContinuedGovernment: Head or Hand?
Nicholas Kyriazi is a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh. A collectivist strain in Western thought envisions society as an organism, with government as the head and the population as the body controlled by the head. This is certainly not what America’s Founding Fathers had in mind, however, and this way of constituting society has created many [...]
1Aug2001 | Nicholas Kyriazi | 1 comment | ContinuedFreedom 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 | ContinuedIt’s Not Over Till It’s Over
“Year after year in Washington, budget debates seem to come down to an old, tired argument: on one side, those who want more government, regardless of the cost; on the other, those who want less government, regardless of the need. “We should leave those arguments to the last century and chart a different course.” —President [...]
1Jun2001 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe 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 | 7 comments | ContinuedGrover Cleveland: A Study in Character by Alyn Brodsky
St. Martin’s Press • 2000 • 496 pages • $35.00 Having just endured vacuousness on a grand scale in the last presidential campaign and eight years of verbal subterfuge and prevarication under Bill Clinton, Americans are in need of an inspiration from their political past. They have it in the person of our principled 22nd [...]
1May2001 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Inventive Period
Andrew Bernstein teaches philosophy at Pace University and is working on a book, The Capitalist Manifesto. An issue of American Heritage (November 1999), a magazine devoted to analyzing important cultural issues in U.S. history, contains an article that provides ample clues to the true nature of late nineteenth-century America. The piece, “People of Progress,” features [...]
1Apr2001 | Andrew Bernstein | 1 comment | Continued-
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