- Downloads:
- A New History of Leviathan_2.pdf
The essays in this book reveal how and in what manner the corporate state developed in twentieth-century America. They show how a sophisticated group of large corporate reformers managed to replace a freely competitive economy and make a new governing class, through the use of reform mechanisms to mold the government into a mighty instrument of monopolization and cartelization.
From Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt to their corporate backers, down to the intellectuals who forged theoretical apologia for the new corporatism, these essays show how these sophisticated corporatist reformers sought to stifle the fierce winds of competition and to achieve what James Weinstein has called the “stabilization, rationalization and continued expansion” of the new political economy.
Murray N. Rothbard made major contributions to economics, history, political philosophy, and legal theory. He combined Austrian economics with a fervent commitment to individual liberty.
In this article from 1950, Murray Rothbard suggests some of the less bad ways of financing military operations. Hint: monetary inflation and taxing savings and investment are among the worst.
Who would join a radical minority movement, and commit him- or herself for life to social obloquy and a marginal existence, for the sake of 20% more bathtubs, or 15% more candy bars? Who will man the barricades either physically or spiritually, for more peanuts or Pepsi?
Every nation-state boundary was drawn by force. Should we treat them as sacred the same way we treat a house or factory? Rothbard says no, and proposes something more radical.
Ronald Radosh is assistant professor of history at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York.
