“The Civil War was really the watershed,” he wrote Meyer. “Lincoln was America’s first dictator, and almost all the Republican Acts were monstrous.”
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Audio recordings of Mises Wire articles, offering contemporary news and opinion through the lens of Austrian economics and libertarian political economy.
The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk has focused attention on political violence. Ludwig von Mises, not surprisingly, understood that tying morality to politicized state helps create the climate where political violence is prevalent.
During the Middle Ages, taxation was considered to be appropriate only as an extreme measure in times of emergency, and as a last resort. Kings were expected to subsist on revenues from their own private property.
Leftists seek to create a new society that supposedly is peaceable. However, they also celebrate violence done against political opponents, something that Murray Rothbard understood as undermining every supposed peaceful goal they claim to be pursuing.
According to mainstream economists, inflation aids economic growth while deflation impairs growth. Austrian economists, however, point out that in much of US history, economic growth was accompanied by deflation.
Advocates for US military intervention have invoked the war against the Barbary pirates as justification. Yet, an examination of that conflict shows that President Jefferson’s actions were limited and followed the direction of Congress.
Was Jackson’s victory over the Second Bank of the United States a triumph for liberty, or did it merely expand federal authority under the guise of constraining it? His legacy is complicated, but there is much we can learn from it.
The Renaissance period is seen as mostly positive by historians, but the sinister development of absolutism and the imperial state complicates the legacy of that time.
Although the political establishment claims the Comey indictment represents an unprecedented moment in our history, the truth is much different. Federal prosecutors have a long history of bringing unjustified, politically-motivated prosecutions.
By trying to protect dairy farmers and raise their incomes, the government created a massive cheese surplus, then gave it away, thus harming the farmers they were trying to support.
Created to assure that newly-freed slaves would receive equal legal protection, the Fourteenth Amendment has come to dominate federal jurisprudence. This is not a good thing.
Individual voters have little reason to become informed. Politicians have strong incentives to pander rather than persuade. Partisans are rewarded for tribal loyalty rather than epistemic integrity.
President Trump’s latest anti-broadcast media actions are portrayed in legacy media as being unprecedented. While they definitely are outrageous, they hardly are the first time presidents have used federal agencies to go after broadcast opposition.
Men can be trained to regard their exploiters as the virtuous architects of safety and prosperity, as so many so-called "citizens" in America are so relentlessly trained to do.
The irony of the Jimmy Kimmel controversy is that he owed his spot at ABC precisely because his work was non-political. Unfortunately in modern America, professional clowns feel they must become political tools.
“Hate speech” does not exist. At all. That’s a concept the Left invented to justify state-enforced censorship of speech the Left doesn't like.
One of the reasons Charlie Kirk was considered "divisive" was that he spoke out against the civil rights laws, which was interpreted as his supporting Jim Crow segregation. Yet, these laws did not increase liberty but rather imposed a new progressive vision on Americans.
Since the French Revolution, leftism has served as the impetus for many of the state’s worst massacres and totalitarian impulses.
Modern political life in the U.S. is increasingly defined by violence and toleration of violence against one's perceived enemies. The murder of Charlie Kirk has exposed the left's endorsement of deadly violence as a political tool.
Political elites insisted that the 9/11 attacks occurred because the US Government lacked power and authority. Unfortunately, the elites got their wish and Americans received war, economic calamity, and massive government debt in return.
