Freedom Home Page of the Week Archive Winter 1998

For more than 35 years, IHS has been offering special services to students who have an interest in the ideas of liberty. They give away close to a half million dollars in scholarships every year, offer internship programs, give career advice, and help student organizations.

Perhaps their most famous program is their series of week-long summer seminars. All the seminars focus intensively on the study of individual rights and free markets, and they are all free to qualified student applicants.

Why are we talking about IHS's seminars this week? Because the free application deadline is March 1. (You can apply by mail, e-mail, or through a Web form.)

He had spent much of his life arguing against the population-control doomsters who think there are too many people on this planet. His most famous argument was laid out in his 1981 book "The Ultimate Resource," which was updated in 1996 as "The Ultimate Resource II." The entire text of this new edition is available here online.

In it, Simon gives extensive evidence that, contrary to environmentalist predictions, "length of life and health are increasing, supplies of food and other natural resources are becoming ever more abundant, and pollutants in our environment are lessening." He shows that "the world's problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom."

Simon proved that "the ultimate resource is people -- skilled, spirited, and hopeful people." He could have used himself as a prime example. We are all much poorer for the loss.

You probably know about independent Net-journalist Matt Drudge. He is the man who broke the Monica Lewinksy sex scandal. He is also the man facing a $30 million dollar lawsuit from Clinton staffer Sidney Blumenthal. An unreliable source told Drudge that Blumenthal abused his wife, and Drudge reported it. (He also fully retracted it within 24 hours, but nevermind the details.)

Drudge has now become the mass media's poster boy for recklessness, rumors, and conspiracy theories on the Internet. He is usually mentioned in hand-wringing stories about responsible journalism and the role of the media in our society. Yuck.

Freedom of speech is in jeopardy here. As a result, the Los Angeles-based Individual Rights Foundation has taken on Matt Drudge's case. His defense is being led, in part, by Reason magazine co-founder Manny Klausner. Come visit this site for details.

Leon Felkins' "A Rational Life" is the kind of page that restores your confidence in humanity, or at least that small portion of humanity which occupies the World-wide Web. Felkins, a retired aerospace engineer, has crafted a wonderfully fulfilling home page exploring game-theory and social dilemmas, politics and the disappearance of common sense. So, take a break from the media scrutiny of Monica Lewinsky's troubled childhood and spend an hour or two here. You'll feel better, we promise. 8->

"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press," H.L. Mencken once wrote, is "its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."

Let us now introduce you to The New Australian, presenting "news with commentary without fear or favour" weekly on the Web.

Edited by Gerard Jackson, TNA consistently refuses to emote, instead reflecting on the benefits of free markets and free trade, defending them against the challenges from greens, politicians and perennially befuddled journalists. TNA covers Australian affairs most closely, of course, but also devotes a good deal of space to the Asian economies as well as the United States.

Lastly, The New Australian features an archive of stories related to Austrian economic theory, highlighting the zine's bias toward that school of thought. Of current interest is TNA's coverage of the Asian economic crisis and its alleged global impact.

(Note: Despite many valuable articles, The New Australian does publish some material that some people consider anti-freedom. Caveat emptor.)

Though the "Sage from South Central" still can only be heard on KABC talk radio in Los Angeles, Larry Elder should be coming to a talk station near you very soon. That is, unless a highly secretive group calling itself The Talking Drum Community Forum has its way.

According to the New Times LA, Talking Drum has actively campaigned against Elder in South-Central, calling him "the most racist, anti-black talk-show host in Southern California," and a "boot-licking, ass-licking Uncle Tom." As juvenile as the attacks may seem, they've drummed up enough negative publicity to scare away over $4 million worth in advertising revenues.

All this hysteria is over Elder's heretical views on race and politics -- nixing affirmative action and the War on Drugs top his list.

As for Elder's home page, it is chock-full of information and opinion from the Sage on race relations, taxes, drug prohibition, politicians, and more. The only shortcoming is its lack of RealAudio samples of the show.

Determined to be considered by historians as something more than a negligible fraud of a president, Buddy's best friend has proposed the largest expansion of Medicare in twenty-five years.

So, now we turn to The Institute for Health Freedom to help straighten out this mess. IHF's Web site features a number of articles and studies covering child care, Medicare and Medicaid, medical monopolies and health insurance, most of them authored by free-market health care expert and IHF president Sue Blevins. The site also links you to health freedom resources in all fifty U.S. states, and includes some of the inane regulations restricting the free practice of medicine.

President Bill Clinton plans to "publicly challenge lawmakers to reach a bipartisan accord to revamp Social Security by no later than 1999," according to an article in Saturday's Washington Post. Awww -- just in time for him to ride off into the sunset.

Why the delay? Chile, under the leadership of former Minister of Labor José Piñera has already done it -- to universal praise. Maybe the president doesn't think it can work here, in spite of the Cato Institute's reassurances.

Many of the world's governments have similar doubts. To combat these fears and push for Chilean-style reform, Piñera founded the International Center for Pension Reform. ICPR's low-graphics Web site is chock-full of studies and articles on pension reform, translated into over a dozen languages and localized for Asian, European and Latin American nations struggling with welfare states run amok. The latest: a Russian minister visited Chile to learn about the reforms Piñera has implemented there!

We don't know. Perhaps it's hopeless. Asking that our lawmakers make a New Year's resolution to pay attention to the Constitution may be too much to ask. "The Ninth Amendment?" they ask, perplexed. But, we guess it never hurts to try. So, we recommend that they check out this page, a fantastic collection of Constitution-related resources on a broad range of topics (abuses and usurpations, electoral reform, public education, political reform, to name only a few). Each section has a collection of classic and contemporary resources related to Constitutional interpretation and application. It is available color-coded by format (HTML, text, zip, etc.). This page is so good... it might make a difference, turn a couple heads, change a couple votes in Congress! Yeah, and I'll cut down on the junk food and exercise every morning before work. Happy New Year!

This time of year, one is constantly reminded about peace and good will toward others. So, we thought it might be nice to highlight some folks working toward that end. And so we give you The Nonviolence Web. While not free-marketeers in anyone's wildest imagination, they do present materials related to war resistance and peace. Of course, it is not a huge leap from issues like "Conscience and the State," "Why A Military?" and "Peace and Taxes" to a consistent philosophy of individual liberty and resistance to coercion in any form. Keeping that in mind, there is a lot of information here that you will enjoy. This site is the Free-Market.Net equivalent in the area of nonviolence.

Of course, the unanimous Supreme Court ruling declaring the Communications Decency Act indecently un-Constitutional was not enough. There are still parents who are genuinely concerned about the safety of their children online. With government regulation out of the picture, someone must fill the void. The Center for Democracy and Technology is that someone. Part of a diverse group of public interest advocates, education groups, and the computer and communications industries that organized the early December Internet Online Summit: Focus On Children, CDT has done a lot of work on the tricky question of how to satisfy parental concerns without chilling the free flow of information on the Internet. Perhaps second only to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the effort to protect Constitutional liberties online, CDT's Web site covers all the major issues (cryptography, digital wiretapping, and free speech). But CDT is doing more than just saying "no," it is offering solutions, proving, in the most profound sense, that freedom works.

This is a beautiful page from libertarian satirist, humorist, rabble rouser and just plain good writer Claire Wolfe, author of the popular "101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution." Wolf imagery predominates, and the theme is very well executed. Of course, there's plenty of content to mine, too. There is a small excerpt from Wolfe's book, but mostly the site is a collection of Wolfe's shorter writings, separated into Serious Stuff, Silly Stuff and Book & Movie Reviews. A new section called Sound-Off invites libertarian and other sympathetizers to add their two cents. An altogether pleasing place to spend an hour or two.

Helping to "keep green the memory of Albery Jay Nock" -- one of this century's greatest advocates for liberty -- The Nockian Society has put together a nice Web page. It features the full text of Nock's best-known work, "Our Enemy, the State." You'll also find a couple of other essays, a complete bibliography and a collection of favorite quotes on a broad range of topics. The site's author makes a point of saying that The Nockian Society is not dedicated to promoting Nock's "message" per se, but to the truth. To this we have only one thing to say: What's the difference?

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