Only in the direct presence of the authority figure do you find that most people will obey malevolent orders. Overall, what we find is that authority is a relatively weak way to establish and maintain social order.
One would think that being on the inside of many decades of careening one step ahead of monetary chaos might induce a sober, even cynical, spirit — that it might lead the insider to call for keeping one's metaphorical air-raid shelter well stocked and at the ready.
While Sechrest's book will be an asset for further research, his untimely death has not only cost many of us a dear friend but will also deprive the continuing debate of his sound scholarship, open mind, and willingness to actively engage in the search for truth.
Historians who are ostensibly concerned about "the little guy" revere US presidents in almost exact proportion to how many people were killed by their subordinates. Beyond Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson's wars, however, is their dismal record of economic interventionism.
In every country the socialists have become office seekers, aiming to get hold of the reins of government by parliamentary methods, and for no other purpose than to enjoy the prerogatives and perquisites of office.
You have only a few years to live and cannot hope to remake society in so short a time. Nobody now living will see a free society in America. But, in fighting for it, one can have a lot of fun. Consider the effort as a legacy to your great-grandchildren.
QE2 is a direct response to deficit spending, which obliges the government to issue more bonds. With QE2, the Fed supports the state by buying these bonds. The Fed thereby actively helps the government in its Keynesian policies, which disrupt recovery.
This is the biggest year in publishing by the Mises Institute in our entire history. We never imagined that we would become a full-fledged publishing house and never planned it that way, but this seems to have happened in any case.
Lately, the supporters of big government have deployed an interesting twist to their arguments, claiming that it is a dirty right-wing lie that government has grown under the Obama administration.
The 17th-century Dutch Protestant Hugo Grotius, deeply influenced by the late Spanish Scholastics, developed a theory of natural laws that he boldly declared was truly independent of the question of whether God had created them.
