Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Young Evangelicals argued that Christianity and libertarianism are compatible, and some even claimed that Christians should advocate for libertarian causes. "Christians actually ought to feel outraged that the redemptive power of charity has been taken from us and given to an unfeeling, coercive state," Leah Stiles Hughey declared at a Saturday panel at The International Students for Liberty Conference. She claimed that when government gets involved in giving to the poor it denies the God-given human dignity of both giver and receiver. Hughey's husband Jason explained that "the Bible is not a book of political theory." Nevertheless, "there...

From at least the time of the 1980’s, the Republican Party and the “conservative movement” have been dominated by, not conservatives, but neoconservatives. The so-called “libertarian” influence in the party is growing—and neoconservatives are none too pleased by it. Libertarians, neoconservatives assert, are “isolationists,” “naïve,” even sophomoric, idealists whose detachment from reality borders on being “unpatriotic,” for libertarians threaten to compromise national security, making citizen and soldier alike unsafe. After all, when his own country is in the midst of a protracted, bloody war, a person who uses his considerable influence to convince large numbers of Americans that their country...

Jenelle Evans, 22, had an abortion this year. Originally featured on MTV four years ago as a pregnant teenager, Evans, who loves to party, had a son, gave the son to her mother to raise, got into heroin, got married and went to jail; her husband ended up in jail as well on drug charges. They got divorced. He didn't know that Evans was pregnant. She got an abortion. He found out about it on the commercials for "Teen Mom 2." Now she's pregnant again. With a third guy. Who may or may not be seeing another woman on the...

I have always been resentful of authority, with an attitude to 'the authorities' of 'who died and made you God?' I've always believed that freedom is only possible within the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

We recently posted Julie Borowski’s video entitled, “Get the Government Off My Donuts.” Sure, it sounds silly and stupid in light of stories about the turmoil in Syria or the persecution in North Korea. Donuts…seriously? Who cares? How shallow is that! Well, despite Julie’s silly donut scarfing demonstration and the light-hearted title, the point of her video wasn’t actually about getting the government away from her donuts. It was about freedom. Nothing shallow about freedom.The FDA taking steps to ban transfats in food doesn’t seem important in light of what’s happening in places like Syria, but the root of Syria’s...

I didn't know what a libertarian was when I started reporting. I was just another liberal. I knew the Republicans were icky, and Democrats were more like me -- except they didn't care about debt. I had no idea there was an actual movement of thinking people who want to honor the principles of the Founders -- liberty and limited government. It took me a long time to wake up. Now more Americans have woken up, say Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie, editors of Reason magazine. "Poll after poll show you that Americans are much more fiscally conservative than...

The libertarian philosophy is taking the Republican Party by storm, according to a poll conducted by FreedomWorks, a DC-based grassroots service center with over 6 million members. With Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and many other liberty-minded politicians gaining influence, libertarianism has generated new interest inside the Republican Party, much to the chagrin of the GOP's political establishment.... "FreedomWorks' poll shows that 42 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of the word ‘libertarian,' and only 10 percent don't know the word, compared to 27 percent who don't know nationally," they added. And the term "libertarian" may...

1. Transparency uber alles. One of the main reasons that Barack Obama's approval ratings are in the crapper is because of his epic failure to live up to his promise to run what he guaranteed would be the most transparent administration EVAH. That's especially true when it comes to national security issues. Even the most hardened anti-terror hawks have been shocked by revelations of widespread secret drone strikes, extra-judicial kill lists, a war on leakers and journalists, and ubiquitous snooping on Americans.... 2. Legal authority is not optional. Whether we're discussing the use of drones, metadata dragnets, or anything else...

Dear friends, Today I'd like to make a few points that concern not so much what we believe in, but how we think about it, how we present it, and how we fight for it. It starts from a simple question: Introduction: Why don't you like the State? People often ask me, why are you against the State, what has the State done to you, personnally? Is it so terrible not be allowed to trade legally in drugs, or to pay a little money in taxes? Well, yes, it is terrible, those are crimes committed against me. But there's much...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday took a big swing at libertarian-leaning lawmakers in both parties, calling the ideology, when applied to national security, “a very dangerous thought.” His comments come just one day after the House narrowly rejected a sweeping amendment to defund the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. Addressing the bipartisan coalition that joined together to nearly push the so-called Amash amendment through, Christie told lawmakers who harbor libertarian views on the issue to explain their position to the victims of 9/11, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reports. He also included Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in...

Oh yes, consider the hostile game of pong that shall be the 2016 GOP national security debate joined. Bounce. Over to you, Rand. ASPEN, Colo. — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday offered a clear broadside against Republicans drifting toward a more libertarian view of foreign policy, lumping Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in with them and suggesting they explain their position to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.The House earlier this week narrowly voted against a reduction in funding for the National Security Agency, as libertarian-leaning members from both sides joined together to vote for the amendment.“As...

Cultural conservatives can’t be too happy about the country’s growing tolerance for gay marriage and legal marijuana, both of which a slim majority now supports. This erosion of traditional moral codes, they fear, will put America on the highway to Gomorrah. But removing government from the business of enforcing morality doesn’t mean that individuals will celebrate their liberation by smoking crack and throwing orgies. It means that they’ll become active agents in choosing their own morality. The late Robert Bork famously warned in his 1996 jeremiad Slouching Toward Gomorrah that America would succumb to moral decadence if Uncle Sam didn’t...

Part 1 in a new series examining the common fallacies committed by both statists and theists. This video covers the fact that both atheism and libertarianism are both negative philosophies, and therefore the burden of proof is on statists and theists ...

You won’t find him on any Federal Election Commission disclosure forms, but Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is the biggest in-kind donor to the incipient Rand Paul–for president campaign. Whatever its merits, the National Security Agency metadata program couldn’t be better fashioned to play into fears of the government. Is it vast? Yes. Secret? Check. Raise profound questions about privacy? Uh-huh. This is the kind of issue Rand Paul was born and (literally) raised to raise holy hell over. The NSA leak came on the heels of revelations that the Internal Revenue Service was singling out tea-party groups for...

"Why are there no libertarian countries?" In a much-discussed essay for Salon magazine, Michael Lind asks: "If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?" Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question. Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don't harm anyone. The job of the state...

LAS VEGAS — “My whole libertarian approach comes out of being just a nutty f'ing peacenik,” magician Penn Jillette confides backstage at his show, a few hours before he is set to perform.

"Most modern liberals, at their most consistent, want a situation in which as many individuals as possible can realize as many of their ends as possible, without assessment of the value of these ends as such, save in so far as they may frustrate the purposes of others. They wish the frontiers between individuals or groups of men to be drawn solely with a view to preventing collisions between human purposes, all of which must be considered to be equally ultimate, uncriticizable ends in themselves." — Isaiah Berlin I've written a lot lately about how conservatives lost the culture war....

On March 15 in The New York Times, liberal journalist and author Richard Reeves wrote an op-ed about the new plan in New York City to dramatize the many negative effects of teen pregnancy on girls who give birth before graduating high school and outside of a stable two-parent unit. Billboards and other advertisements around the city, for instance, point out that unwed teen mothers are twice as likely to not finish high school as girls who don't give birth before graduating.With many smart qualifications, Reeves makes a case for shaming regarding teen pregnancy and other behaviors, and he...

Last week, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter told me and a thousand young libertarians that we libertarians are puss- -- well, she used slang for a female body part. We were in Washington, D.C., at the Students for Liberty conference, taping my TV show, and she didn't like my questions about her opposition to gay marriage and drug legalization. "We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist," she says. "The government takes 60 percent of your money. They take care of your health care, your pensions ... who you can hire ... and you (libertarians) want to suck up...

<p>Ann Coulter on why she thinks libertarians are "******s": "We’re living in a country that is 70-percent socialist, the government takes 60 percent of your money. They are taking care of your health care, of your pensions. They’re telling you who you can hire, what the regulations will be. And you want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, ‘Oh, but we want to legalize pot.’</p>