Following World War II, President Truman helped produce the modern national security state by creating the Central Intelligence Agency. Only later did Truman regret what he did, as the CIA turned into a monster that could never be tamed.

The classical liberals—especially those of the more radical variety such as Molinari, Bastiat, etc.—saw the state as a far greater threat to freedom than any other organization.

How do we define liberty? Hayek saw it as the absence of most (but not all) coercion, but that depends upon how one defines “coercion.” Murray Rothbard believed that Hayek was too willing to accept forms of coercion that were anti-freedom.

Mainstream economists claim that they can use econometric models to emulate human action and, thus, create an economic laboratory. These models, however, cannot tell us about cause-and-effect, which is vital to understanding praxeology and economic behavior.