Freedom Home Page of the Week Archive Summer 1997

Jason Sorens, aka "An Claidheamh Ceilteach," is a well-known Net libertarian with a great home page. Sorens archives a lot of writings here -- his school newspaper columns, other journalistic writing, and a number of interesting academic papers relating to liberty. You'll also find writings on Celtic culture, music, and Sorens' brand of Christian libertarianism (decide for yourself whether it is defensible). Sorens has also assembled a nice collection of links, and some self-described "rants."

Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy has inspired many people, but not very many academic scholars. In fact, mainstream philosophers have tended to dismiss Rand's ideas. But Chris Matthew Sciabarra is starting to turn the tides with his entertaining, quality academic research on Rand and other prominent 20th-century free-market theorists.

Sciabarra is the author of "Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical," and "Marx, Hayek, and Utopia." His Web page provides abundant resources relating to these writings. What's especially nice is that Sciabarra shows you not only his own work, but also what his critics are saying -- and how he responds to them.

If you check out these critics, you'll notice that many of them condemn Sciabarra in no uncertain terms. Indeed, his work has created a great deal of controversy. This page is a great place to get the facts to judge for yourself.

John T. Flynn (1882-1964) was a well-known journalist and commentator in the first part of this century. He was an opponent of the New Deal and an isolationist -- part of the "Old Right."

"The Roosevelt Myth" is one of Flynn's most famous books, but long out of print. Now we're lucky to have it available for free in this wonderful e-text edition.

"When the war drums rolled a great golden veil came down upon the American scene through which its actors would be viewed. Behind it they postured -� statesmen and generals and admirals �- in the role of heroes. And lifted above them all, posing in the full glory of the stage lights, decorated by propaganda with the virtues of a national god, was the figure of the Leader. When the battlefield is so far away, war is the greatest of all shows. It is the greatest of all booms. The money flows in rushing streams and for millions it becomes and remains the dizziest and most abundant memory of their lives."

This critical account of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal is well worth reading to debunk the myths you learned in history class, and to gain some new insights on our own generation of wars, statism, and immoral leaders.

"Social Security's financing problems are a result of its fundamentally flawed design, which is comparable to the type of pyramid schemes that are illegal in all fifty states."

It's been common sense for free-market advocates for years, and now it's becoming common sense for just about everyone. Major Social Security reform is inevitable, and The Cato Institute has recognized this as a tremendous opportunity to shift the debate towards real privatization. SocialSecurity.Org is Cato's showcase for the issue. The site includes articles and essays, Congressional testimony, and even RealAudio and RealVideo. Another great feature of the page is the interactive calculator that lets you see exactly what you stand to gain by privatization!

Do you know the name Neal Boortz? He's based in Atlanta, so we've never heard his radio news show. But we understand it's one of the best. His Web site shows why. Boortz delivers pointed stories which portray the strategy of government regulators as it really is: a complete (though very expensive) joke. Nealz Nuze -- Boortz' "daily diatribe on the news" -- is updated every weekday. His biting, but objective, commentary places modern politics under proper display. It is up to the reader to decide whether to laugh or cry.

With the atrocities of Cambodian Communism so much in the news lately, it is worth taking some time off to look at the similar -- but far less known -- record of massive human rights violations in Communist Vietnam. FreeViet is a great place to start your investigations. FreeViet provides some historical information on the ignored oppression of the people of Vietnam by their Communist rulers. But the focus of FreeViet is on the current struggle for human rights in Vietnam -- the rights of Vietnamese dissidents, religious dissenters, and so on -- and on the efforts of emigre Vietnamese to draw world attention to continuing human rights violations. FreeViet helps to remind us that despite the fall of the Soviet Empire, much of its legacy persists... and the Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs of Vietnam, China, and elsewhere deserve the support of world opinion.

Julian Simon is one of the greatest living champions of liberty. He's widely-known as a "doomslayer" (as he was called in a Wired magazine feature about him), and perhaps most famous for his 1980 bet with population-control Nazi Paul Ehrlich. Simon said natural resources were become cheaper, not scarcer and more expensive, even though the population was growing fast. Of course, Simon won.

Simon has debunked the doomsayers time and again. He has written widely on the economics of immigration, population, and natural resources. But he's not just a free-market economist, this man is a true polymath. Simon has written a bestselling book on direct marketing, a book on overcoming depression, and developed an innovative system for learning and teaching statistics.

Does any of that whet your appetite? Well then, you're in luck. Simon also happens to be one of us: an enthusiastic user of the Internet. He has made almost a dozen of his complete books available online, and at least a hundred articles.

If you aren't familiar with Pete Boettke, you should be. He's a fine scholar (and he's also a great guy). His Web page features generous helping of his publications and works-in-progress. You'll find features on Austrian economics, libertarianism, public choice theory, and the economic and social failings of Communism. And don't miss Boettke's book reviews -- they can be quite entertaining. Economics and economists may have a low expected entertainment value, but this page will confound your expectations.

Sophal Ear is a remarkable young Cambodian scholar who lived to tell the world about the horrors of Pol Pot's regime. His webpage is full of information on the "Cambodian Auto-Genocide," along with studies of the Cambodian economy, some of his favorite quotations, and links to his favorite sites. But perhaps the most interesting feature on this page is Sophal's exhaustive study of Western intellectuals' response to Pol Pot's regime. Is there really a leftist double-standard that overlooks any crime committed with socialist intentions? After reading Sophal's paper, there can be little doubt. Particularly valuable is Sophal's analysis of Noam Chomsky's writings on Cambodia and the Western media. Chomsky's critics have accused him of apologizing for mass murder; his defenders have replied that Chomsky did nothing of the kind. The truth, Sophal argues, is that Chomsky was a kind of apologist-by-stealth -- who doggedly attacked any errors in Western coverage of Cambodia while refraining from commenting on the basic fact that over a million Cambodians had been murdered. Chomsky's charges of (right-wing) media bias simply don't withstand examination, Sophal notes, for numerically small human rights abuses in U.S.-allied South Korea and Chile got far more media attention than Cambodia. Careful study of this site will make you wonder not only at the capacity of the State for senseless brutality, but of the recurring capacity of Western intellectuals to defend senseless brutality as a high virtue.

But who is this hunted ex-dictator, and what did his Khmer Rouge movement do to Cambodia? There's no better place on the Web to find out than the Cambodian Auto-Genocide Page. Here you can learn the heart-wrenching details of an entire nation condemned by its rulers to slavery. Even now, the facts can scarcely be believed -- 2 million murdered out of a population of 8 million. Entire cities emptied at gunpoint, its inhabitants condemned to till the soil for their bare subsistence, while the Communist elite savored the spoils. Verily, here was Communism in its starkest and most consistent form, a hell on earth that Stalin and Mao could only dream of. And while the Khmer Rouge in some ways seemed to be holdovers from Stalin's heydey, they also foreshadowed frightening developments in the radical environmentalist ideology found for example in the Unabomber's Manifesto: hatred of the city, modern technology, glorification of the simple life of the primitive tribe -- and an eager wish to impose the Anti-Industrial Revolution by force. If Pol Pot's trial for crimes against humanity comes to pass, it can only be hoped that the man, his movement, and his ideas will at last receive the verdict they deserve.

If you haven't heard of Michael Huemer yet, you will. He's sure to make the next big libertarian splash in academic philosophy -- not yet out of grad school, he already has a fine critique of John Rawls appearing in the journal Social Theory and Practice. There's so much on this site. There's a fantastic set of lecture notes for an intro philosophy class, with much of interest to libertarians. There's the best critique of Ayn Rand I've ever read, entitled Why I Am Not an Objectivist. There is the most powerful defense of moral realism I've ever read. You'll also find prize-winning essays on Ayn Rand, some fine papers on Aristotle, Kant, and other important philosophers, and drafts of Mike's dissertation in progress. Above all, Huemer is known for the crystal clarity of his thinking. You won't find the pretentious cant so endemic in the "soft" academic disciplines -- just simple, forthright exposition. If you haven't discovered Michael Huemer until now, you are in for a treat.

Eight years have now passed since the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the suppression of the Chinese pro-freedom movement. A great place to learn more about the past and the future of the struggle for liberty in China is Support Democracy in China. There are detailed presentations on the history of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and their suppression by Deng Xiaoping's government. There's information on -- and links to -- sites exposing the Chinese government's retention of Mao's system of slave labor/"re-education" camps. You can hear the stories of courageous Chinese dissidents, who not only survived the slave labor camps, but risked re-imprisonment to document these human rights violations. The grip of Deng's successors on power still seems secure, but with a dissident movement of this caliber, the people of China can look forward to freer days.

In case you haven't heard, Libertarian Alliance is one of the best, if not the best, libertarian organizations in the United Kingdom. Their Web site, Libertarian Alliance Publications contains not only a full index of their truly voluminous publications; it also makes many of their publications available over the Web free of charge. By their latest count, there are 550 LA publications, applying the insights of libertarian thinkers to every conceivable field: political theory, economics, history, philosophy, religion, current events, etc. What's best about the LA Publications is that they truly offer an open forum for quality libertarian thought. Some publications explore the radical limits of libertarian ideas. Others criticize popular defenses of libertarianism, from Rand to Rothbard to David Friedman. Still others turn their intellectual sights on rising threats to human freedom, such as gender ("radical") feminism and anti-human ("radical") environmentalism. The menu is so diverse here, you really have to read it yourself; but a few of my personal favorites you can read straight off the LA homepage are:

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