Author: The Future of Freedom Foundation

by Jacob G. Hornberger The Democrats are threatening to enact a court-packing law if Amy Comey Barrett, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg, receives Senate confirmation. The Democrats feel that Joe Biden, should he win the November 3 election, should name Ginsberg’s replacement. The court-packing law would add additional justices onto the Supreme Court, all of whom would be appointed by Biden, which, obviously, would effectively nullify Barrett’s votes as well as the votes of other Republican-appointed members of the Court. The controversy brings to mind that infamous court-packing scheme of President Franklin Roosevelt, which ironically the mainstream press hardly ever alludes to during the current controversy over Barrett’s nomination....

by Laurence M. Vance In July 2010, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI), launched the “If You See Something, Say Something” national campaign to raise “public awareness of the indicators of terrorism and terrorism-related crime, as well as the importance of reporting suspicious activity to state and local law enforcement.” The national campaign was originally “implemented and trademarked” by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and is licensed to the DHS “for the purpose of creating a nationwide campaign.” The DHS campaign is limited, and therefore “cannot be used for any purposes besides those related to terrorism and indicators/behaviors t...

by Richard M. Ebeling Few would disagree that we have been and are living through some unprecedented times in 2020. A global pandemic, government-imposed and mandated lockdowns and shutdowns of much of the world’s economic activities and social interactions, and total government debts that cumulatively are almost equal to the global economy’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But while comparisons are being made between the impacts and effects of the coronavirus and the Great Depression of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, they are not really anywhere alike. To begin with, the Second World War cost the lives of an estimated 50 million people, combining military and civilian lives lost. Advancing and retreating armies and air bombardments undertaken by all sides in that conflict...

by  Jacob G. Hornberger Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 [to be published] It would be difficult to find a better example of American socialism than the institution of public schooling or, as it might be more accurately termed, government schooling. Public schooling is based on socialist central planning. Whether at a federal, state, or local level, government officials plan, in a top-down, command-and-control manner, the education of millions, thousands, or hundreds of students. Participation in the state’s education system is mandatory. To ensure compliance on the part of parents, the state has enacted what are called compulsory-attendance laws. If parents refuse to subject their children to the state’s system, the state will secure a judicial order from a state ju...

by Richard M. Ebeling Eighty years ago, on August 2, 1940, the leading living member of the Austrian School of Economics, Ludwig von Mises, arrived in the United States as a refugee from war-torn Europe. Hated by the socialists, viewed as a “class enemy” by the communists, and despised as “racial vermin” by the Nazis, Mises, like so many others, had made the journey across the Atlantic to the shores of the country that was still considered a haven of freedom in a world that seemed increasingly threatened with a totalitarian future of one form or another. The migration of Europe’s cultural legacy to America Nazi domination of Central and Western Europe, especially after the fall of France in the summer of 1940, meant the exiling of much of Europe’s living culture to the Americas....

by Laurence M. Vance “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun,” said the wisest man who ever lived in the book of Ecclesiastes. Although King Solomon wasn’t writing about libertarianism, what he wrote certainly applies to critics of libertarianism. While doing some unrelated research on the history of conservatism, I noticed that conservatives, beginning in the 1960s (Frank S. Meyer, M. Stanton Evans, Russell Kirk, L. Brent Bozell, Robert Nisbet, William F. Buckley, and other writers in National Review), used much of the same rhetoric and sometimes even the same talking points in pointing out the problems they perceived with libertarianism. Libertarianism misconceptions ...

by Richard M. Ebeling “If I Ruled the World,” say the lyrics in the hit song from the 1960s, the world would be a beautiful place with a smile on everyone’s face. Every man would say the world was his friend, with happiness that no man could end. No, my friend, not if I ruled the world. A nice fantasy for a daydreamer, but a dangerous plan in the hands of those presumptuous and arrogant enough to think that they could and should have the power to remake the world in which we all live. We seem to be in the midst of a tidal wave of such dreamers who are dreaming of their ability to reconstruct and redirect the social and economic affairs of the rest of us. The coronavirus crisis with its accompanying government-made economic recession has served as the catalyst for even more such dre...

by Jacob G. Hornberger The modern-day libertarian movement is besieged by statist proposals to reform the welfare-warfare state way of life in which Americans live. Included among such reform proposals are things like Social Security “privatization,” school vouchers, health-savings accounts, immigration “reform,” and many more. As I have indicated in previous articles, reform-oriented libertarians have long maintained that these reform proposals are “freedom and free enterprise.” Of course, that’s simply not true. Libertarianism — or genuine liberty — necessarily requires the elimination of infringements on liberty, not their reform. Reform leaves the infringements intact, albeit in some modified or reformed fashion. By and large, the reform idea began being introduced ...

by Jacob G. Hornberger How many times have we been told that the information we send to the Internal Revenue Service in our federal income tax returns is guaranteed to be kept confidential? So much for that myth, as President Trump can now attest. The New York Times somehow secured a copy of Trump’s income tax returns and is excitedly telling the world what they contain. One thing is for sure: If the president of the United States can’t keep his income tax returns private, no one else can either. From the very start of Trump’s quest for the presidency, the mainstream press has been obsessed with getting its hands on his tax returns. And from the very start, Trump refused to disclose them, which he has every right to do. Trump took the position that his tax returns...

by Richard M. Ebeling We are in the midst of an open counterrevolution against liberty and limited government in the United States. This may sound like strong language for dramatic affect. But it is really not an exaggeration in the current climate of political discord and antagonism, admittedly amplified by it being a presidential election year when political parties make hyperbole the norm. An example of this counterrevolution may be seen in a recent attack on the classical liberal, free market economist, the late Milton Friedman, in the pages of The New York Times. Through a good part of the post-World War II era, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was a leading voice for personal freedom and economic liberty, as well as one of the most internationally prominent economic scholars of his...