Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Individual Liberty

January 23, 2013

History Shows Freedom Drives a Car

If you want to improve the material conditions of the poor and working classes, what is the one economic metric you should consider most important? For progressives the answer is income inequality, since a wide disparity between the incomes of the rich and poor is considered by them to be an obvious sign of injustice and a justification for using the force of the government to redistribute wealth. Continue Reading...
January 15, 2013

What is the Purpose of Our Government?

If we asked many of our fellow Americans today “What is the purpose of government?,” undoubtedly, we might be barraged with some vexing or comical answers. But I’m not one to believe that a good deal of our citizens can’t answer this question quite intelligibly. Continue Reading...
January 14, 2013

Why Would Anyone Choose Twitter Over Indoor Toilets?

Do most people value electricity and indoor plumbing more than cell phones and the Internet? In his article, Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?, economist Robert Gordon argues that they obviously do, and offers this thought experiment to prove his point: A thought experiment helps to illustrate the fundamental importance of the inventions of [the second industrial revolution] compared to the subset of [computer age] inventions that have occurred since 2002. Continue Reading...
January 10, 2013

Media Bias in the HHS Mandate Fight? Say It Ain’t So

USA Today has a piece today on the HHS mandate battle. What I noticed was not so much the story, but the photo the newspaper chose to run. It’s an AP photo by Derik Holtmann from a rally held last spring, about the same time as numerous other rallies were taking place around the country. Continue Reading...
January 08, 2013

Is the Government Making Us Fat?

It’s that time of year: we’re making resolutions to get on the treadmill, join the gym, eat an apple every day. And yet, Americans are getting fatter and fatter. Is it the government’s fault? Continue Reading...
January 08, 2013

Three Ways to Defend the Free Market

Nicholas Freiling offers three helpful suggestions for how advocates of liberty can defend the free market: 1. Raising questions is always better than giving answers. Capitalism defends itself. It is logical, coherent and well-supported. Continue Reading...
January 07, 2013

Free Speech Still Not Free on College Campuses

Even though the crowds stop paying attention, most fads never completely disappear. Just like Beanie Babies, Furbies, grunge music never really went away, some other 1990s fads—like campus speech codes and absurd political correctness—still haunt us: From free speech codes and zones that quarantine unpopular speech to freshman orientation programs that force a left-wing world view on impressionable students to outright censorship and threats by Administrators to expel students and fire professors, Lukianoff’s new book, Unlearning Liberty, details dozens of blatant violations of the First Amendment and due process. Continue Reading...
January 03, 2013

Evaluating the Emancipation Proclamation

One hundred and fifty years have passed since President Abraham Lincoln issues one of the most extraordinary proclamations in our nation’s history. The Emancipation Proclamation declared: That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. Continue Reading...