In all discussion of 9-11, one year later, much attention is given to the firefighters, police, and emergency workers whose services, as employees of the public sector, were called on that day. You may hear about the innocents who died on the airplanes that were hijacked and used as missiles. The people you won’t hear about are those who were specifically targeted and murdered.

At last the topic of 9-11 has shifted onto productive ground. Thanks to the efforts of former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, some thought is being put into the government failures behind the attacks. “Your government failed you,” he says. Precisely, and in many more ways than he or anyone else at these hearings is willing to say.

Let’s just say the postal system were private, and delivering packages of anthrax to government offices. Imagine, then, how dramatically different the spin would be. The carrier companies would be catching hell for not having the proper security measures in place, and for obviously “putting profits ahead of safety.” All political pressure would be for nationalizing the mails. Surely this is the only way to assure total protection!

Let’s think about the word security, which has been in the news lately because the Bush administration seeks a major shift in the way funds are spent in Iraq. It wants $3 billion moved from spending on reconstruction to spending on “security.” There’s a political science lesson in that usage.

[This column is dedicated to the memory of the friends and associates of the Mises Institute who died at the hands of the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center.]

“Markets do not exist as a ‘policy’; they are the de-facto result of respecting rights to person and property.”

Thank goodness this bloody century, the era of communism, national socialism, fascism, and central planning—in short, the century of government worship—is coming to an end. May we use the occasion to re-pledge our allegiance to human freedom, which is the basis of prosperity and civilization itself, and to repudiate every ideological force that opposes it.

Why does freedom need a relentless intellectual defense? Because of statements like the following:

the legitimacy of global capitalism as the dominant system of production, distribution, and exchange will be eroded even further, even in the heartland of the system; while there are villains aplenty, it is the dynamics of the system of deregulated, finance-driven global capitalism that is the central problem.

Beginning next week, on Ash Wednesday, we will all be witness to the largest mass act of arts/humanities consumerism since the last Harry Potter book. Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion will be released. It is widely believed to be the most powerful film representation of Christ’s crucifixion ever made.

If you love bad news, devote your life to studying government. You’ll learn about the colossal waste of NASA, the diseases spread by the school-lunch program, the lies of the FBI, the corruption subsidized by foreign aid, and the debauchery of the military base.