Just about everyone you talk to these days admits serious dissatisfaction with the election choices this year. And yet most people will eventually decide for the “lesser of two evils”—whatever that is, and there is probably no way to know in advance—realizing that no real viable option is going to emerge.
I recently became a heart patient, something that a former collegiate distance runner finds hard to accept. One day, I am of the belief that I am invulnerable to heart disease, and the next day finds me in a cath lab having angioplasty to unblock three arteries, a sobering turn of events.
The newest political cliché offered up by the Republicans speaks of the need for an “Ownership Society.” To those of us who support private property, it might sound good at first. But let us think about this before embracing it.
Price stability is a misleading and an inherently contradictory concept. When such a construct as the price index becomes the guiding post for central banks, they will tend to produce and reinforce the very instabilities they proclaim to fight.
Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1922 that “nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich.” He also said that such a policy creates nothing. It is a purely destructive act that results in capital consumption.
Macroeconomic model builders have finally realized what Henry Hazlitt and John T. Flynn (among others) knew in the 1930s: FDR’s New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt “got us out of the Depression” and “saved capitalism from itself,” as generations of Americans have been taught by the state’s education establishment.
Two years ago I was on a faculty committee to choose the one book that incoming freshmen would be asked to read and discuss in discussion groups during freshman orientation. It was the School of Business’s turn to choose the book, so I thought it would be valuable, for once, for the freshmen to read a book that was not the latest popular left-wing polemic, Marxism Lite, as seemed to be the practice.
Hans F. Sennholz, winner of the 2004 Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Liberty, is one of the handful of economists who dared defend free markets and sound money during the dark years before the Misesian revival. He did so with eloquence, precision, and brilliance. He has never tired in all these years, and remains an eloquent spokesman for liberty in our time.
It is the conviction of the liberal intellectual tradition dating back to the Middle Ages that society contains within itself the capacity for internal self-management. This is in contrast to the claims of the sociology literature, which posits that human society is riddled with conflict between groups: races, ages, ethnicities, and abilities. The sociologists have sliced and diced the human population to such an extent that it would seem impossible for anyone to get along at all, and certainly not in times of emergency.
