[Excerpted from chapter 11 of Theory and History.]

In previous decades libertarians viewed intellectual property as a boring and technical area of the law, the province of legal specialists. They also assumed it to be a legitimate, if arcane, type of property in a capitalist, free-market society. After all, it’s in the Constitution, and Ayn Rand blessed it. But we don’t ignore it anymore, and we don’t take its legitimacy for granted. We can’t. The injustices of IP have multiplied in the Internet age and are staring us in the face.

From the Dirty Dancing Wikipedia article…

Later, Baby discovers that Johnny’s dance partner Penny Johnson (Cynthia Rhodes) is distraught over being pregnant by Robbie Gould (Max Cantor), the womanizing waiter who is dating and cheating on Lisa, Baby’s sister. Baby learns that Robbie plans to do nothing about the pregnancy as he says “Some people count, some people don’t.”

George Carlin in 1991:

We enjoy war. And one reason we enjoy it is that we’re good at it. You know why we’re good at it? Because we get a lot of practice. This country is only 200 years old, and already we’ve had ten major wars. We average a major war every twenty years, so we’re good at it!

Great thinker, great book, great presentation!

These days, explicit arguments in favor of fascism and the ideology of unlimited state power are, how shall I put this, ineffective at convincing the masses. Though people still adore the fascist ideology of the boundless power of the state and its fusion of public and private business, this is only so long as it is not given its proper name. These days, people prefer their fascism to be cloaked in disingenuous and deceptive language that disguises its true nature.

[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]

In previous posts I’ve mentioned the UK banking reform ideas spearheaded by UK MPs Douglas Carswell and Steve Baker with the support of Cobden Center founder and entrepreneur Toby Baxendale (see links at the end of this post). Baxendale sent me the following for posting here for discussion and commentary here on the Mises Blog, and also asked Steve Horwitz to post it on Coordination Problem (it’s up there at Another Banking Proposal from Toby Baxendale):

One of our most recent uploads is The Liberal Tradition from Fox to Keynes, edited by Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock, published first in 1957. It is an extremely inspiring book that collects the great writings and speeches of English liberals from the 18th to the 20th century.