All Posts Tagged With: "u.s. constitution"

Lysander Spooner: American Anarchist

It was in the early 1970s that I first learned of Lysander Spooner’s ideas. The six volumes of his Collected Works, which were published in 1971 and which I purchased soon thereafter, played an important part in my intellectual development as a voluntaryist. I was the person who in 1976 unearthed Spooner’s essay “Vices Are [...]

24Aug2011 | Carl Watner | 7 comments | Continued

The Preamble They Should’ve Written

Did the Founding Fathers get it right? Is the Constitution they drafted a secure basis for limited government? Many conservatives suppose so and believe the drift to big government has simply been a case of not reading the directions on the package. Last January these conservatives ordered that the Constitution be read aloud at the [...]

22Jun2011 | James L. Payne | 21 comments | Continued

Fear-Mongering and Servitude

In his 1776 essay, “Thoughts on Government,” John Adams observed, “Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.” The [...]

22Jun2011 | James Bovard | 33 comments | Continued

Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution

This book is a well-executed account of the Constitutional Convention, clearly the fruit of many years of scholarly work. It will doubtlessly and quite deservedly come to be seen as one of the best nationalist accounts of the origins of the Constitution. (And since nationalist accounts hold American historical writing under military occupation, the book’s [...]

22Dec2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 2 comments | Continued

Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism

In one of his most iconoclastic essays, “The Anatomy of the State,” Murray Rothbard observed that it is crucial to ruling groups to manipulate the thinking of the ruled. They must get the populace to accept that the rulers are truly good people working tirelessly to advance the common good. Toward that end, the rulers [...]

22Dec2010 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

The Fourth Amendment and Faulty Originalism

“All arrests are at the peril of the party making them.” —Alexander H. Stephens, August 27, 1863 These days the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution means next to nothing. Consider, for example, the choice offered a few years ago: surveillance under routine, easy “warrants” from the drive-through FISA Court or warrantless surveillance at the whim [...]

25Aug2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 3 comments | Continued

Capital Letters

Where Is the Dollar Defined? To the Editor: I was belatedly reading in the November 2003 issue of Ideas on Liberty when I came across something that caught my eye. This was the statement in George Leef’s book review of Pieces of Eight by Edwin Vieira, Jr., claiming that the Constitution defined a dollar as [...]

6Jul2010 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | Continued

The Rise of Government and the Decline of Morality

The recent financial crisis has expanded the power of government. Tea parties have revealed the disillusion of millions of Americans with the rise of government and the decline of morality. The crisis has damaged, unfairly, the vision of market liberalism. It is essential, therefore, to reexamine and articulate the principles of a free society and [...]

29Jun2010 | James A. Dorn | 10 comments | Continued

Race & Liberty in America: The Essential Reader / Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America

Two recent books criticize racial discrimination from a classical-liberal perspective. The first, Race & Liberty in America, is an anthology edited by Jonathan Bean, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University. It includes dozens of selections, from 1776 to today, arguing eloquently for colorblind equality before the law and against slavery, Jim Crow, and [...]

20May2010 | Roger Clegg | 3 comments | Continued

Drugs, Economics, and Liberty

Only a few people would dispute that narcotics can harm people, whether that harm is in the form of damage to the body, mental and physical dependency, or threats to social relationships. However, there is not nearly as much consensus as to what the correct public response to narcotics use and sales is. Ideas range [...]

20May2010 | Walter E. Williams | 39 comments | Continued

Do We Really Want a Right to Health Care?

Do you have a right to health care? People want a right to health care because they think it will guarantee them the services they need. But might obtaining health care as a political right rather than a market commodity have a downside? The government cannot produce or purchase an infinite amount of health care. [...]

20Apr2010 | Theodore Levy | 4 comments | Continued

The Census: Vehicle for Social Engineering

In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott commented on the role played by census data in the rise of the modern State: “If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are imagining a state [...]

19Apr2010 | Wendy McElroy | 1 comment | Continued

Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush

There have now been many conservative and libertarian books covering the demise of American liberty under the U.S. Constitution, so if you don’t think you need to read another one, I understand. Still, if that’s what you think, you’re wrong. The latest entry in the genre, Thomas Woods and Kevin Gutzman’s Who Killed the Constitution?, [...]

17Jun2009 | Jacob H. Huebert | 1 comment | Continued

The Holiday That Isn’t

I know it’s only October, but that’s late enough in the year for most people to have already begun thinking of the holidays just around the corner. We will each observe the traditional ones according to our personal wishes—a precious right won for us by past and present patriots. Allow me to advise you, however, [...]

1Oct2008 | Lawrence W. Reed | Comments Off | Continued

Capital Letters

Mistreating the Constitution? If recent items in The Freeman are any indication, its writers take a rather dim view of the Constitution and the Framers thereof. While I couldn’t agree more regarding the people who wrote our federal compact (with a few exceptions), I must take issue with how the magazine treats the Constitution itself. [...]

1Oct2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Freedom or Free-for-All?

Lawrence Reed became the president of FEE on September 1. To honor the occasion, we reprint his first “Ideas and Consequences” column, which was originally published in The Freeman in April 1994. Imagine playing a game—baseball, cards, “Monopoly,” or whatever—in which there was only one rule: anything goes. You could discard the “instruction book” from [...]

1Sep2008 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued

Equality, Markets, and Morality

Burton Folsom, Jr. is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of New Deal or Raw Deal?, to be published by Simon & Schuster this year. The subject of “equality” is the source of much political debate. Ever since the founding era, free-market thinkers have argued for equality of opportunity in the economic [...]

1Sep2008 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 5 comments | Continued
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