Today, many Christians feel it natural to adopt a brand of social conservatism when it comes to politics and public policy. Not only do we see them hold public demonstrations against what they view as social vices, they also usually call for legislation to regulate, control, and ban these activities.
Walter Block’s new book Toward a Libertarian Society covers a wide variety of topics from the death penalty to secession, and from war to macroeconomics. Dr. Block recently spoke with the Mises Institute about just a few of these.
Mises Institute: You say in your book that it is a contradiction in terms to be both libertarian and to be for an aggressive foreign policy. Why is this?
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Despite claims to the contrary in the mass media, Japan’s economy is continuing to suffer mightily under the leadership of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Abe is from a famous family and he’s a convincing talker, so he was able to bamboozle people into believing that he could make Japan prosper with his three arrows. These metaphorical arrows stand for “monetary stimulus,” “fiscal stimulus,” and “structural reform.”
The Federal Reserve System of central banking was a response to the financial panics of 1903 and 1907 that rocked the US financial system. One of the key objectives, if not the only real one, was to counterbalance the nefarious nature of fractional reserve banking.
From the left we often see tension between those who want to help the poor, and those who want to help the government. One recent example of this is the proposal to ban cash forwarded by Harvard’s Ken Rogoff.
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In a 2010 Bloomberg Television interview, Alan Greenspan said, “The general notion the Fed was propagator of the bubble by monetary policy does not hold up to the evidence. ... Everybody missed it — academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators.”
In Alabama last week, an estimated 900 union reps, politicians, local business owners, and their families rallied to raise awareness of supposed steel import dumping and how it threatens their way of life. They have a point.
Robert Blumen, a software engineer with a background in financial applications, recently spoke with the Mises Institute about the Austrian School’s growing influence among investors.
Mises Institute: In recent years, we’ve seen more and more Austrian-tinged economic analysis coming from investors like Mark Spitznagel and Jim Rogers, to just name two. As someone personally involved in the investment world, have you yourself seen growth in Austrian ideas among investors and similar professionals?
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[Adapted from Rothbard’s book review of Freedom and the Law by Bruno Leoni. This review first appeared in New Individualist Review, edited by Ralph Raico.]
This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily
Everyone loves making a buck, including governments. Unfortunately, the reality of many “great deals,” especially in the history books, has today been inflated to mythical proportions.
