Chapter 36: In Praise of Demagogues
For many years now, demagogues have been in great disfavor. They are not sober, they are not respectable, they are not “gentlemen.” And yet there is a great and growing need for their services. What, exactly, have been the charges leveled against the demagogues? They are roughly three in number.
Chapter 35: Why Be Libertarian
Why be libertarian, anyway? By this we mean: what’s the point of the whole thing? Why engage in a deep and lifelong commitment to the principle and the goal of individual liberty? For such a commitment, in our largely unfree world, means inevitably a radical disagreement with, and alienation from, the status quo, an alienation which equally inevitably imposes many sacrifices in money and prestige. When life is short and the moment of victory far in the future, why go through all this?
Chapter 34: Society Without A State
In attempting to outline how a “society without a State”—i.e., an anarchist society—might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the State back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics.
Chapter 33: Notes on the Nintendo War
For the first two days and nights of the war, I, like many other people, stayed glued to my TV set, watching the war, concentrating on CNN but flipping in and out of the networks. Then, suddenly, it hit me: I wasn’t getting any news. And it remains true. What we have been getting is:
Chapter 32: War, Peace, and the State
The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its “strategic intelligence” in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to “pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors” (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most vital problem of our time: war and peace.
In a new article on Dodd-Frank from the Heartland Institute, Andy Torbett writes:
Mark Thornton, a senior fellow with the Mises Institute, says Dodd-Frank has all but ended the days of the friendly, small-town neighborhood bank.
Despite zero-interest-rate-policy (ZIRP) and multiple quantitative easing programs — whereby the central bank buys large quantities of assets while leaving interest rates at practically zero — the world’s economies are stuck in the doldrums. The central banks’ only accomplishment seems to be an increase in public and private debt.
The Russian government is readying a new issuance of foreign bonds and has invited non-Russian banks to participate in the bond auction.
Chapter 29: The Progressive Movement
The Federal Reserve Act of December 23, 1913, was part and parcel of the wave of Progressive legislation, on local, state, and federal levels of government, that began about 1900. Progressivism was a bipartisan movement which, in the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century, transformed the American economy and society from one of roughly laissez-faire to one of centralized statism.
Chapter 30: Unhappiness with the National Banking System
The previous big push for statism in America had occurred during the Civil War, when the virtual one-party Congress after secession of the South emboldened the Republicans to enact their cherished statist program under cover of the war. The alliance of big business and big government with the Republican Party drove through an income tax, heavy excise taxes on such sinful products as tobacco and alcohol, high protective tariffs, and huge land grants and other subsidies to transcontinental railroads.
