All Posts Tagged With: "u.s. constitution"
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?, is something [...]
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, not [...]
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.
Sheldon Richman [...]
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 the start [...]
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 order. [...]
The “Stable Bulwark of Our Liberties”
The U.S. Supreme Court in June struck a blow for the separation of powers and dealt the Bush administration a big setback by ruling that suspects held without charge at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to contest their imprisonment under the doctrine of habeas corpus.
Simply put, the Court held that the government may not [...]
Torture and Liberty
Contributing editor James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, Terrorism and Tyranny, Lost Rights, and other books.
Is torture compatible with liberty?
Unfortunately, this is no longer a hypothetical question. Many Americans who claim to support individual freedom also favor permitting the government to torture suspected terrorists or other purported enemies of the United States.
This [...]
Slick Construction Under the Articles of Confederation
Writing lately on the Fourth Amendment, Professor Thomas Y. Davies decries the “originalism” practiced by certain Supreme Court justices and sundry legal commentators. On historical-hermeneutic grounds, he faults face-value originalism for missing “the shared, implicit assumptions that informed the public meaning” on which a given constitutional provision rested. Underlying the Fourth Amendment were common-law rules [...]
1Apr2008 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Constitution or Liberty
“Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”
We might think those words—or words to the same effect—are in the U.S. Constitution. But they are not. They are from Article II of the Articles of [...]
The Constitution Within
I’ve argued previously that a free society depends ultimately on people having a proper sense of just conduct. This means more than the words they recite or put on parchment. Most crucial is how they act and expect others, such as those in the government, to act. For this reason it is futile to put [...]
1Sep2007 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedDemocracy or Republic?
Walter Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University.
How often do we hear the claim that our nation is a democracy? Was a democratic form of government the vision of the Founders? As it turns out, the word democracy appears nowhere in the two most fundamental founding documents of [...]
Lost Articles
The Constitution says that to be elected to the U.S. Senate, a person has to be 30 or older, a citizen for at least nine years, and a resident of the state from which the candidate is elected.
Alas, it says nothing about knowing American history.
Good thing for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). He’d have to find [...]
Two Presidents, Two Philosophies, and Two Different Outcomes
In the White House, Wilson intended to be a strong president working with a “living Constitution.” He promoted the expanding of “beneficent” government into new areas. In his second year as president he concluded that shipping rates were too high, and he blessed his secretary of treasury’s plan to regulate overseas shipping rates and the companies doing the shipping.
1Jun2007 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | Continued“Deliberative Democracy” Dementia
James Bovard (jim@jimbovard.com) is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy Palgrave, 2006), Terrorism and Tyranny (Palgrave, 2006), and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Rights (St. Martin’s, 1994).
A specter is haunting America ’s politicians and professors—the spect(er of illegitimacy. The political-intellectual elite fear that millions of Americans will conclude that the current democracy is a [...]
Congressional Generosity
Every now and then we get a glimpse into what government officials really think about our rights to life, liberty, and property. The U.S. Justice Department recently provided such a glimpse in a controversial tax case, Murphy v. IRS.
How revealing it is! Did you know that if the government abstains from taxing all your income, [...]
The Sovereign Presidency: Is This What the Framers Had in Mind?
American government under the Constitution was supposedly meant to work as follows: Congress, staying within delegated powers and the Bill of Rights, passes laws; the president executes the laws; and the courts sort out ensuing wrangles. This plan ran aground rather early—the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, for example—which raises at least two possibilities: 1) [...]
1Jan2007 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 2 comments | ContinuedCapitalism and Democracy
I recently heard a prominent American politician tell how a “chill” went up his spine when he heard someone question the importance of democracy. How could anyone doubt the value of democracy? he wondered. Fortunately, he said, he soon realized that by “democracy” his (European) interlocutor really meant “capitalism.” Whew, he thought, that’s all right, [...]
1Nov2006 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 0 comments | Continued-
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
