Governments were threatening trade wars with retaliatory tariffs and quotas, belligerents suffered currency devaluations and balance of payments deficits, and everyone threatened legal action. The United States and Japan in 1995? No, this situation described the relationship between the states in 1780.
When lampooning the various arguments for trade barriers, Murray Rothbard would like to try to use the arguments offered against foreign trade to trade between states themselves.
As he wrote in Making Economic Sense:
25 years ago this morning, FBI tanks were busy collapsing the home of the Branch Davidians atop their heads. FBI was also gassing the children, women, and men - leading to a conflagration that left 76 people dead. Waco shows that it is not an atrocity if the U.S. govt. does it - that federal aggression against Americans will often be ignored by the media - and that Congress cannot be trusted to expose federal outrages.
Nostalgia for the past — either our own past or just general times past — is a powerful emotion, and it often manifests itself in an image of the past in which times were “simpler” and people lived a slower-paced, easier, more comfortable lifestyle. Oh sure, people didn’t have the luxuries they had today, but they were satisfied with what they had, and used their large amounts of leisure time to build bonds with family, and pursue the simple things.
When a person gains power over other persons — to do his bidding when they do not believe it right to do so — it seems inevitable that a moral weakness develops in the person who exercises that power. It may take time for this weakness to become visible. In fact, its full extent is frequently left to the historians to record, but we eventually learn of it. It was Lord Acton, the British historian, who said: “All power tends to corrupt;. absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
[Condensed from The Story of Research by E.J. duPont deNemours & Company, and the address of the Company’s President, Crawford H. Greenewalt, May 10, 1951.]
Women were not freed from their 18th century servitude by feminist agitation, but the invention of the sewing machine, the washing machine, the refrigerator, and the dish washer, together with the revolutionary developments for handling and distributing foodstuffs.
Back in 2013, I shared a poll to see who people would pick as their “favorite political cartoonist.” Michael Ramirez currently has the lead, which doesn’t surprise me when you look at options (here, here,
This is a simple video, cheap to produce, and free to post. It is about the fact of its own existence. The talking head is the remarkable investigator James Corbett.
