Has John Gray come back? Once a classical liberal admired by Murray Rothbard, Gray many years ago abandoned the defense of the free market. Herbert Spencer, he now claimed, was a precursor of fascism;
Paul Gottfried’s excellent book lends strong support to a controversial claim of Murray Rothbard’s.
As Gottfried shows, Buckley has often played a malign role in purging from conservatism those not in accord with the values he at the time professes. He would not allow Old Rightists such as John T. Flynn access to his magazine to argue against the Cold War statism it was the principal aim of National Review to advance.
We all assumed that there were two poles: a 'left' pole of Communism, socialism, and total government; and a 'right' pole of libertarianism and individualist anarchism.
Like many intellectuals at the turn of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde was both interested in the problems of society and a proponent of socialism.
After the death of Taft and as the Eisenhower foreign policy began to take on the frozen Dullesian lineaments of permanent mass armament and the th
Re-nationalization, high tariffs, Keynesian monetary and fiscal “policy”, and all the U.N.’s CEPAL recipe for disaster is back in
Woodrow Wilson’s speech on postwar reconversion, As printed in American Affairs, V7,
