The Myth of Democratic Socialism
Rothbard illustrates that both in theory and in practice, socialism is a system unsurpassed in brutality, despotism, mass murder and exploitation. Socialism deserves no solemn respect or moral salute.
Rothbard illustrates that both in theory and in practice, socialism is a system unsurpassed in brutality, despotism, mass murder and exploitation. Socialism deserves no solemn respect or moral salute.
While upholding the radical ideal, Rothbard happily cooperated with anyone who wanted to limit government power, no matter how gradually. The perfect was never the enemy of the good in his mind; the good was always an improvement. He combined idealism with realism, scholarship with accessibility, and boundless curiosity with commitment to truth.
The unscrupulous are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.
In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects.
Peter Seewald has published an extensive biography of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, which will be of special interest to all supporters of the Austrian school and lovers of liberty who, whether believers or not, persistently condemn the “fatal conceit” of statism.
In every country that has moved toward socialism, the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals.
"The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other."
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.
Judgments of value do not measure: they arrange, they grade. If he relies only on subjective valuation, even isolated man cannot arrive at an economic decision based on more or less exact computations in cases where the solution is not immediately evident. To aid his calculations he must assume substitution relations between commodities. That's where exchange value and prices come in.
The Roman Empire never doubted that it was the defender of civilization. Americans have added freedom and democracy. Yet the more that may be added to it the more it is the same language still. A language of power.