Hysteria is sweeping the land about the supposed honor of the American flag, and throughout the country, state, and federal legislators are competing with each other in proposing ever stiffer punishments for the high crime of desecration. Eager-eyed snoopers ferret out any use of flag cloth for covering or in the theater, and the long arm of the law quickly reaches out to apprehend and chastise these often unwitting criminals. We await some fervent patriot proposing death by torture for the high crime of mistreating a piece of cloth with red and white stripes.

There is nothing more important for those who think they believe in freedom, in free enterprise and in private property, than bringing these high-flown generalities to bear on the concrete problems of their daily lives. It is very easy to say, or believe, that one is devoted to freedom, so long as freedom remains a lofty and unanalyzed generality. There is nothing, of course, wrong with such generalities; on the contrary, they are indispensable for any thought or action on this vital subject.

Consistency has long been one of the most glaring causalities of our political life; but the typical views on the mess in higher education have been hopelessly muddled even by contemporary standards. Thus, for years conservatives have been attacking the huge and swollen bureaucracies engaged in dispensing higher education, especially the gigantic and ever burgeoning state universities.

Murray Rothbard was a true polymath. He wasn’t just the number one theoretician of the modern libertarian movement — author of the monumental Man, Economy, and State; Conceived in Liberty, a four-volume history of the American Revolution; the two-volume An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, and essays too numerous to list — he was also its most tireless publicist, at least in its early days.

He didn’t live in an ivory tower: far from it. As he wrote in a 178-page memo entitled “Strategy For Libertarian Social Change”: