“War is a continuation of politics by other means.” — Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Politics can continue by other means aside from direct kinetic war. Proxy wars and sanctions are just among the few tools that, if I must interject, have made conventional military might old-fashioned. Even if statecraft requires the monopolization of violence (for repression) to consolidate power, history itself is littered with cases where repressive regimes tried to hold onto power, only to violently collapse and/or be replaced with another repressive regime.

Thomas Sowell, the great economist, is not generally well regarded in some parts of the self-described “black community.” They call him an “Uncle Tom,” meaning a traitor to the black race. An anonymous commentator who shares daily quotes from Sowell on social media wrote on Facebook that he sees this “every single day. Multiple times a day.”

They never quote him back. They never cite a book. They never explain what he got wrong. They just say the words [Uncle Tom] and wait for applause.

. . .

For the Austrian School of economic thought, the methodological foundation is unshakable: the praxeology of Ludwig von Mises is based on an a priori logic of human activity, which fundamentally does not need statistical models or empirics for its justification. A person acts purposefully, seeking to remove “felt uneasiness.” And this deductive law is universal, indisputable.