Today we at ARI will unapologetically celebrate Columbus Day — and so should you. Why? Because Columbus Day celebrates the life-promoting core of Western Civilization; namely, reason and individualism.
Do all people desire freedom? If we look at the history of civilization and at popular political movements over the last hundred years, argues Onkar Ghate, the answer is definitely no.
Political figures from Jefferson to Lenin to FDR and philosophers from Locke to Marx to Rawls all claim to stand for liberty. But they have radically different understandings of what liberty is, and so they advocate very different sorts of societies.
“Give me liberty or give me death.” This inspiring slogan from the American revolutionary period is all the more impressive when we remember that the revolutionaries were not trying to flee a totalitarian dictatorship but were rebelling against one of the freest, most prosperous nations of their age. There is an important insight here — American revolutionaries demanded, in full, the political freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence as a matter of principle. What was the principle these revolutionaries held so dear and why don’t Americans see it the same way today?
A couple of weeks ago, ARI executive chairman Yaron Brook was interviewed on Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal on the merits of “Trumpian Nationalism.”
Freedom of speech is a bedrock principle throughout the Western world, but increasingly it is being challenged — on college campuses, among intellectuals and in politics — in the name of preventing “hate” speech or offensive speech or protecting allegedly “marginalized” groups.
In front of an audience of approximately four hundred young Ukrainians at Free Generation Forum 2016, Yaron Brook argues that the ongoing trend of growing government power at the expense of individual liberty won’t end by itself.
The fifth annual European Students for Liberty Conference took place March 11 to 13, 2016, at the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. The title of the conference was Students We Should Remember and many stories were told of past heroes of liberty and why we need more of them to build a brighter future. It was a record-setting attendance year with 908 students passionate about liberty and freedom coming together to discuss and learn more about the issues of our time.
