Last week, researchers at the the University of Washington released a new study predicting that US life expectancy would fall further and further behind other countries over the next twenty years. Life expectancy will continue to increase, but at a slower rate than many other countries.
Whether or not these predictions ever come true, depend on many of the study’s assumptions also coming true.
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
by Quinn Slobodian
Harvard University Press, 2018
x+381 pages
JEFF DEIST: Tom, you grew up in Boston. Your dad was a blue collar guy and also a Teamster. So, tell us a little bit about him and your childhood.
TOM WOODS: He was a Teamster for 18 years, and worked as a forklift operator in a food warehouse for a grocery chain that no longer exists. I wouldn’t say he was a Reagan Democrat because he was never a Democrat. He was a blue-collar Reagan Republican. That was the kind of household I grew up in. My father had very strong political opinions.
In an 1800 letter to Gideon Granger, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only...”
In other words, the only job of the federal government ought to be foreign affairs.
Chapter 3: Libertarianism and the Alt-Right: In Search of a Libertarian Strategy for Social Change
We know the fate of the term liberal and liberalism. It has been affixed to so many different people and different positions that it has lost all its meaning and become an empty, non-descript label. The same fate now increasingly also threatens the term libertarian and libertarianism that was invented to regain some of the conceptual precision lost with the demise of the former labels.
Chapter 4: Coming of Age with Murray
I first met Murray Rothbard in the summer of 1985. I was then 35 and Murray was 59. For the next ten years, until Murray’s premature death in 1995, I would be associated with Murray, first in New York City and then in Las Vegas, at UNLV, in closer, more immediate and direct contact than anyone else, except his wife Joey, of course.
Being almost as old now as Murray was at the time of his death I thought it appropriate to use this occasion to speak and reflect a bit on what I learned during my ten years with Murray.
Index
a priori truth, 8
academics, role of, 31
adversity, Rothbard’s reaction to, 109
affirmative action laws
end of, 93
role of, 36
agnosticism, 102
alternative lifestyles, advocacy of, 14
Alt-Right (Alternative Right), 78
beliefs of, summarized,
80
goals of, 81
lack of theoretical foun-
dations for, 82
mysticism of, 20
America’s democratic capital-
ism 102
Chapter 2: On Democracy, De-Civilization, and the Quest for a New Counterculture
Because every action requires the employment of specific physical means — a body, standing room, external objects — a conflict between different actors must arise, whenever two actors try to use the same physical means for the attainment of different purposes. The source of conflict is always and invariably the same: the scarcity or rivalrousness of physical means. Two actors cannot at the same time use the same physical means — the same bodies, spaces and objects — for alternative purposes. If they try to do so, they must clash.
Chapter 1: A Realistic Libertarian
Libertarianism is logically consistent with almost any attitude toward culture, society, religion, or moral principle. In strict logic, libertarian political doctrine can be severed from all other considerations; logically one can be — and indeed most libertarians in fact are: hedonists, libertines, immoralists, militant enemies of religion in general and Christianity in particular — and still be consistent adherents of libertarian politics.
Getting Libertarianism Right
