Anyone who has worked in middle management has likely, at one time or another, had their big boss pass out some dopey management books that especially touched the hamster-brained sociopath (as Scott Adams would say) who was in charge of operations.
The honor of being called the "father of modern economics" belongs not to its usual recipient, Adam Smith, but to a gallicized Irish merchant, banker, and adventurer who wrote the first treatise on economics more than four decades before the publication of the Wealth of Nations.
Julian Assange cracked the government's veil of benignity and brought into question the state's tactics. So the state must destroy him.
Government and the media bombard us with examples of real or often just imagined threats and expand them so that they become as big as our worst nightmares. As more of us buy into an overblown story, it takes on a life of its own and often becomes the accepted truth.
It's not as if TSA officials had said all along, since 2001, that they needed full-body scanners in order to do their jobs properly. Had they said that in the beginning, then the public probably would've protested enough such that the "small-government" George Bush wouldn't have nationalized airport security.
The Keurig coffee maker is another landmark in the long struggle to leave the state of nature and climb to ever-higher stages of the great chain of being. At each stage, we can easily observe the path from the collective to the individual.
Gold in the money survived all the way to Nixon, and it was he who finally drove the stake in once and for all. That was supposed to be the end of it, and the beginning of the glorious new age of paper prosperity.
The connotation of unreality that the word has acquired follows from the fact that every utopia ignores the central operating lever of man: he seeks to satisfy his desires with the least expenditure of effort.
What are the results of the patent system itself? The results are distorted research, protectionism, wealth transfers, and enrichment of the patent bar. Large companies, such as IBM, amass giant patent portfolios.
Murray Rothbard, in his life, was known as Mr. Libertarian. We can make a solid case that the title now belongs to Walter Block, a student of Rothbard's whose own vita is as thick as a phone book, as diverse as Wikipedia.
