The is the second of two lectures I recently gave for the Free Enterprise Society at Oklahoma State University. In this talk, I examine origins of the Second Amendment in the English Civil Wars and how English opponents of absolutism preferred local militias to a national standing army. I look at how the Second Amendment was supposed to serve a similar purpose and ensure that each state possessed enough independent military power to counterbalance federal military power.

Human prosperity, contrary to the beliefs of those fanatically obsessed with viewing the government as a savior of humanity, is not guaranteed. For the vast majority of its existence, mankind was impoverished, only recently experiencing unprecedented levels of prosperity and flourishing. This recent state of affairs is not guaranteed to go on forever; its growth could be halted or it could regress the world back to widespread impoverishment if given the right circumstances.

Ludwig von Mises begins his book Bureaucracy by declaring that the main issue facing the West in his time was whether man should surrender his liberty to the “gigantic apparatus of compulsion and coercion, the socialist state.” He rephrases: “Should [man] be deprived of his most precious privilege to choose means and ends and to shape his own life?”

Money supply growth fell again in January, remaining deep in negative territory after turning negative in November 2022 for the first time in twenty-eight years. January’s drop continues a steep downward trend from the unprecedented highs experienced during much of the past three years.

In the last section of his Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises laments the loss of the “critical sense” that protected people from authoritarianism (Mises 1944, 108). According to Mises, this was the fault of the bureaucratization of education, which taught students falsehoods, especially in economics (Mises 1944, 82). A prime example was the academic class in the German Empire, which formed an “intellectual bodyguard” (Mises 1944, 82) of the empire’s policies.

Ludwig von Mises is known for his theory of the business cycle and his development of praxeology, but he is best known for discrediting socialism. This critique is found in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Mises 1990) and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Mises 1951). In a similar vein is a work written near the end of the Second World War: Bureaucracy (Mises 1944). Mises observed shifts away from the market toward interventionism following the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Javier Milei, presiding over Argentina, the first libertarian president in history – self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist- has warranted worldwide attention and cast light over libertarianism around the globe. Libertarianism has become more widespread since he entered the political scene. This comes with a definitely positive side and a more dangerous one. The positive side is obviously that libertarianism is more popular than before.