In recent years, I’ve increasingly suspected that when it comes to foreign policy, the realists offer some of the most sane observations. 

When former Attorney General Janet Reno died last November, the media heaped praise on her as if she had been justice incarnate. Reno had long enjoyed sainthood inside the Beltway; the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia even created a Janet Reno Torchbearer Award. But Reno’s record of deceit, brutality, and power grabs should not be forgotten by any American who cares about freedom.

[On this day in 1949, Yale University Press published the first edition of Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action. The following is from Hazlitt’s “Two Masterpieces by Mises.”]

We’ve long been told that gentrification is the scourge of many communities, and we’ve become very familiar with the scenario: a stable middle-class community is destroyed when wealthy (usually white) people move in, drive up home prices, and force out the “diverse” population that had been there previously. 

After years of abuse, the term “sexism” has become subjective to the point where it can be misconstrued in a variety of ways. In some cases, we’ve been told that sexism is being made worse by markets as producers of goods and services make sexist products or charge women more for products than they charge men for the same products. Common manifestations of this problem, we are told, include the gender wage gap, the “pink” tax, and sexualization in media.

[This article is a selection from Where Keynes Went Wrong]: 

Paul Samuelson, professor of economics at MIT after World War II and author of a best-selling economics textbook, was one of Keynes’s most ardent American disciples. Here is what he has to say about the latter’s General Theory:

Conscription, also known as “the draft,” is typically justified with appeals to values like partriotism, public service, and “sharing the burden.” That’s in peacetime. In times of war, of course, government claims conscription is necessary to provide the manpower needed for military victory.

Apologists for the draft keep all of these claims ready, just in case. The US, of course, has never really let go of the draft and continues to maintain the Selective Service, just in case.

This article originally appeared in the ”New Individualist Review,” vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 1962, pp. 15–27.

The extortions and oppressions of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims—so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the archbishop’s secretary’s nephew’s mistress’ illegitimate son is a sin against the Holy Ghost. ~ H. L. Mencken