Gregoire Canlorbe, who interviews Mark Thornton here, has posted a new an interesting interview with former Czech President Václav Klaus.
Klaus describes himself as a defender of the “Nation-State,” but in an interesting way.
For Klaus, the Nation-State acts as a bulwark against further centralization at the continental or the — god forbid — global level.
[Newsweek column from May 9, 1949, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.]
We are now being told that our prosperity has been kept going in the last few years by our huge government spending, particularly on armaments and foreign aid. Any decline in this spending, we are now warned, would bring a recession. We are told, in fact, that if further signs of recession develop the Government must spend still more to keep the boom whipped up.
[Newsweek column from March 21, 1949, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.]
When Donald Trump raised taxes on steel and aluminum in the form of a large tariff hike, virtually no one in Washington seemed much perturbed by the fact that the president raised taxes without so much as a debate in Congress.
In the grade-school version of American politics, of course, children are taught that Congress controls government taxation and spending. Tax increases must be subject to a vote in Congress in order to become law. Or so we’re told.
What’s the best argument against statism?
As a libertarian, my answer is that freedom is preferable to coercion. Freedom also ranks higher than prosperity. For instance, the government might be able to boost economic output by requiring people to work seven days a week, but such a policy would be odious and indefensible.
If it seems like secession is become a more frequent topic in the global media, it’s not just your imagination.
In recent years, talk of political separatist movements have become not only more commonplace, but are increasingly discussed as reasonable alternatives to the status quo.
Historically, of course, established states have long sought to portray secession movements as unsavory forms of agitation pushed only by extremists.
I first met Professor Salin in late 1997, in his office at the University of Paris-Dauphine. When I mentioned that I had been drawn to the Austrian School not least of all because of Mises’s epistemology, he raised his eyebrows and put on a skeptical face. I stopped talking and he threw in with amusement, “And all of economics is for you nothing but applied epistemology.”
How prevalent has political corruption been over recorded history—and how did it originate? Quite an inkling as to its prevalence and origin can be found in a book written by H. J. Haskell and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1939. The book is The New Deal in Old Rome.
The average man lacks the imagination to realize that the conditions of life and action are in a continual flux. As he sees it, there is no change in the external objects that constitute his well-being. His world view is static and stationary. It mirrors a stagnating environment. He knows neither that the past differed from the present nor that there prevails uncertainty about future things. He is at a complete loss to conceive the function of entrepreneurship because he is unaware of this uncertainty.
One day in 1927 Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, stood at the window of his office at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, and looked out over the Ringstrasse (the main grand boulevard that encircles the center of Vienna). He said to his young friend and former student, Fritz Machlup, “Maybe grass will grow there, because our civilization will end.” He also wondered what would become of many of the Austrian School economists in Austria. He suggested to Machlup that, clearly, they would have to immigrate, perhaps, to Argentina, where they might find work in a Buenos Aires nightclub.
