Were the Founding Fathers somehow to return, they would find it impossible to recognize our political system. War has warped our constitutional order, the course of our national development, and the very mentality of our people.
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.
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.
