Richard M. Ebeling

The Declaration of Independence, proclaimed by members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of the American experiment in free government. What is too often forgotten is that what the Founding Fathers argued against in the Declaration was the heavy and intrusive hand of big government.

This June marks the 45th anniversary of the revival of the Austrian School of Economics. During the week of June 15-22, 1974, the Institute for Humane Studies brought together about 50 people in South Royalton, Vermont to listen to a series of lectures by three of the...

It seems that every generation or two, fundamental economic ideas are questioned and challenged. The reasonable and important idea that governments should balance their budgets on an annual basis was challenged in the 1930s by the rise of Keynesian Economics and the...

If there is one common enemy that all opponents of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government seemingly can agree upon it is the “evil” of neo-liberalism. Everything that is hated in an open, competitive market society is summed into that word and...

The end goal of our planning paternalists is the command economy, the government-directed market, with all businesses required to follow the planner’s investment and employment directives and, presumably, be subject to some type of punishment if the imposed targets...

Those who have seen the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie Poltergeist may remember the scene when the little girl touches the snowy screen of her family’s television and says, “They’re here,” meaning the evil ghostly forces bringing death and destruction. Well, they are...

Another partial federal government “shutdown” began on December 22, 2018. The impression from the media and other commentaries easily suggested that the political and economic sky was about to fall. Various government departments were closed and some government...

The famous New York Yankees baseball player and manager Yogi Berra is credited with the saying “It's déjà vu all over again.” He is also credited with claiming, “I really didn’t say everything I said.” Never were both of these truer than in our era of reborn defenses...

Freedom and the free society are once again under direct attack by those who espouse far-greater degrees of government control over people’s lives. Wrapping themselves in the cloak of progressivism, “social justice,” and liberation from oppression and discrimination,...