Ivan Eland, Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute, writes in a recent article:
[I]s the conventional wisdom correct that the United States needs to exchange blood for oil? Many economists don’t think so. Before the first Gulf War, two Nobel laureates in economics — Milton Friedman on the right and James Tobin on the left — stated that no war for oil was needed. In fact, the Persian Gulf countries need to sell oil more than the United States needs to buy it.
This is the case that Mises tried and failed to make to the Austro-Hungarian imperialists about the Ukraine in WWI.
According to Jorg Guido Hulsmann, Mises made the claim that there is no economic rationale for the extension of political borders in his 1916 article, “The Goal of Trade Policy.” As a consequence, he was immediately sent back to the front.
To learn more, listen to Hulsmann’s lecture, “Mises’s Courage in the Face of Calamity,” from the Mises Institute seminar, “Boom, Bust, and the Future.” January 18-19, 2002.
