The Virtue of Nationalism
Yoram Hazony
Basic Books, 2018
285 + vii pages

Yoram Hazony is a thinker of great originality, and in The Virtue of Nationalism, he enables us to see nationalism in a new way. He is not a libertarian, but his way of looking at nationalism can be of great value to libertarians in understanding how our views should be applied to the world in practice.

JEFF DEIST: You were born in Romania.  Were you born in the countryside or in Bucharest?

CARMEN ELENA DOROBĂŢ: I was born in a very small town in the eastern part of Romania close to the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia. That part of Romania, it’s pretty small, I think about 50,000 people. It is just your regular small town. Growing up, everyone knew my family, we knew everyone. I moved to Bucharest when I went to college, when I was 18.

We live in strange times indeed when an environmental reporter for The New York Times writes that we should stop pushing for a carbon tax, just a few weeks before dozens of distinguished economists sign a letter to the Wall Street Journal calling for a carbon tax.

In domestic policy, a time-honored strategy for ramming through ill-considered legislation is to insist that it is better to do something than to just stand around doing nothing. Are “too few” people earning advanced degrees? Then we are told we must increase subsidies for college tuition. Will that solve the problem? Who knows? What’s important is that we did something.

This sort of thing is politically valuable, of course, because the new program and the new spending can be seen and measured.

Professor Paul Krugman asked a very important question in his January 10 New York Times essay “Trump’s Big Libertarian Experiment; Does contaminated food smell like freedom?”.  In his opinion piece, Krugman maintained that the recently concluded governmental shutdown demonstrated the hypocrisy of Republicans. The Nobel Prize winning economist also defended a plethora of government programs such as the Small Business Administration, food stamps, the FDA and socialized medicine.

Since the 1990s, it has become increasingly popular for the United States and other Western nation-states to justify new wars on the basis of “humanitarianism.” This was the case in Somalia in 1993, in the former Yugoslavia in the mid 1990s, and in Libya in 2011. Humanitarianism was also part of the justification given for both Gulf Wars (in 1991 and 2001) and in Afghanistan. We are now told by many in the media and in the US military establishment that invasions of both Syria and Venezuela could be justified on grounds of humanitarianism.

I’ve periodically opined about why politicians should not try to control people’s behavior with discriminatory taxes, such as the ones being imposed on soda.

And I’ve cited some examples of how these taxes backfire.

Mises Institute Fellow Patrick Newman recently joined the Age of Jackson podcast to discuss Murray Rothbard’s The Panic of 1819.

Topics discussed on the show include Rothbard’s analysis of the panic, why he believed it to be the best received of his books among his profession, and why it remains one of the most cited works on the era.