Mises Daily

Those who read Acton today will treble Lord Morley's praise of him and affirm that they would undertake to find on every page of Acton at the very least one pregnant, pithy, luminous, suggestive saying. For Acton's is the splendid voice of charity and informed wisdom heard from above the merciless and warring extremists of a sorely perplexed time. His reputation as a master historian, elevated as a mountain of constancy above the flat wastelands, attests that the greatness of a soul is measurable by the duration — the undefeatable vitality — of its moral force.

"Twenty-five percent of college-bound high-school students cannot name the ocean separating the United States from Asia. This happens despite the fact that education funding in the United States tripled from 1960 to 2000."

"The pensions/social security system is an intergenerational Ponzi scheme, the biggest scam ever invented."

Investment and lending abroad are only possible if the receiving nations are unconditionally and sincerely committed to the principle of private property and do not plan to expropriate the foreign capitalists at a later date.

Caplan's claim that the value-scale approach is inadequate for explaining these effects is simply an incorrect interpretation of Professor Rothbard's theoretical framework.

For while the humanists would hear of no institutional check on state rule, one critical stumbling block still remained: Christian virtue. What was needed, then, to complete the development of absolutist theory, was a theoretician to fearlessly break the ethical chains that still bound the ruler to the claims of moral principle. That man was the Florentine bureaucrat Niccolò Machiavelli.

Above all, central planning allows a few who are the new elite to seek to control the total lives of the masses. It is this gigantic object lesson which brings the intellectual issues into focus.

In the end, this is the reason why progressivism as a system of economic thought is every bit as bankrupt as Social Security.

Ayn Rand made the case for the freedom philosophy in the most aggressive manner possible, bless her. And, "capitalism" was a crucial element of that effort.

Men do well under a plan and its controls if the Gestalt to be accomplished makes sense, is not too distant, and offers rewards as well as challenges for different levels of skill. But this is quite different from a superimposed, infallible political philosophy which would urge on us an engineered society.