Entrepreneurship

Ordinarily I agree with John Stossel.

Mencken saw the implications of where his thinking was leading him and he acknowledged those implications frankly. "I am," he wrote in <em>The Smart Set</em> in 1922, "a libertarian of the most extreme variety."

Obama says that the key to progress is good government. Not so. The real common thread to progress is free enterprise. Progress and prosperity have followed movement toward freer markets and secure property rights.

In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuals and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind.

One by one, Mises discusses and dispatches the pillars of progressive dogma: government spending can create jobs for the unemployed; the service motive is better than the profit motive; government choices are superior to individual choices.

One does not need to be a Brookings Institute scholar&mdash; specializing in &quot;oil dependence, electric vehicles, and climate change&quot; &mdash; to see why no one will willingly purchase an all-electric car, much less the one million that President Obama wants on the nation's highways in five years.

Groupon is a brilliant concept that uses social networking to mobilize shoppers and bring down prices. In contrast to all the mainstream economic models of "market failure," Groupon is yet another example of market success.

Friedenberg was among those who regarded US participation in the Vietnam War as an abomination. He had begun expressing his outrage in print in the mid-'60s, though most of it was directed at American public schools rather than at American foreign policy.

There is, after all, the surprisingly favorable response that libertarianism encounters from people in all walks of life.

But what both the classical and the historical schools have neglected, the Austrian School is today trying to accomplish.