The year 1898 was a landmark in American history. It was the year America went to war with Spain—our first engagement with a foreign enemy in the dawning age of modern warfare. Aside from a few scant periods of retrenchment, we have been embroiled in foreign politics ever since.
It's a paradox: never before has a government in human history assumed unto itself the power to regulate the minutiae of daily life as much as this one. At the same time the United States is overall the wealthiest society in the history of the world.
Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy.
Hoarding is not even a very disruptive process, because for every miser stuffing money into his mattress, there are numerous misers' heirs ferreting it out. This has always been the case, and it is not likely to change drastically.
It is true that if labor becomes more efficient, workers must find other uses for the time they now have available. But why is this a problem? Human beings have unlimited wants, and there are always new uses for human labor.
Keynes and Hazlitt: their lives and loyalties are a study in contrast — and mostly of choices born of internal conviction, in Hazlitt's case, or lack thereof, in Keynes's case.
Only Spooner realized that it would be compounding crime and error to try to use government to right the wrongs committed by another government.
With this analysis of gift giving, we're reminded that mainstream economists seem hell-bent on reforming anything they haven't already screwed up.
It is not a conclusive proof of a doctrine's correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.
Disillusioned in the Prussian state, the Young Hegelians proclaimed the inevitable coming apocalyptic revolution to destroy and transcend that state.
