The Wall

I remember reading the digest-sized magazine that would show up every month, bringing an enlightening and refreshingly different perspective on economics and government. It was a "libertarian" magazine, and I was thrilled every time one of the free issues showed up in the mailbox.

Yes, you read that right, it was free for the asking, all you had to do was write them one time and they would send you the freedom-promoting periodical forever. As I recall, that eventually ended, but for decades that was their policy. Who are "they"? They are FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education. As Gary North writes here, that successful strategy of "giving it away" was adopted by Lew Rockwell. Writes North:

One of the most important ideas he ever appropriated is Leonard E. Read's strategy of giving everything away. Read's Foundation for Economic Education published The Freeman, the monthly magazine of free market ideas. FEE copyrighted the magazine. Then it released everything into the public domain, unless an author requested copyright protection.

The Freeman's past articles are archived here, published in HTML, and here in PDF format.

It was a monthly reading experience that tore down the wall of conventional thinking that had been all I'd been exposed to and propagandized with by the media and the school system.  In a real sense, I was free for the first time in my life. My views did not become solidified after that,  and I would, for some time, still think the way I was "supposed" to about politics and voting and the military and all the other nonsense we're all brainwashed with. But the seed had been planted...

In its zeal to protect us from Mexicans who want to pick our fruit and clean our homes, the federal government is walling off our southwestern border. Congress passed the Secure Fence Act (SFA) in 2006, authorizing barriers along some portions of the 1,969-mile boundary; other stretches will be fitted with a “virtual” wall of motion sensors and cameras. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was supposed to have built almost 700 miles of physical fence by the close of 2008 and the Bush administration.

We can assume it fell short since the federal government is ever incompetent and has been tight-lipped about how many miles it has completed.



Whether they’re between states or countries, borders soon cease to be noticed by most people living along them. They marry one another, establish businesses, visit, laugh, cry, agree, disagree, and dream together. So it is along the U.S.-Mexican boundary. The wall will sunder these families and friends as mercilessly as Berlin’s barricade did Germans.

The Founding Fathers understood government’s essence, its cruelty and callousness, far better than do modern Americans. That’s why their Constitution never empowers politicians to regulate anyone’s movement into or out of the country...

Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall!