As a followup to my posts Jesús Huerta de Soto’s LSE Hayek Lecture on Banking Reform; UK Parliament Speech Invokes Mises Institute re Honest Money and Sound Banking and UK Proposal for Banking Reform: Fractional-Reserve

We received the sad news today that Joseph Sobran, always a good friend to libertarianism and the Mises Institute, has died. He was surely one of the great stylists of the 20th century and a wonderfully inventive thinker – a man who loved liberty with his whole heart and worked desperately to explain its principles to others even as he never stopped refining his own understanding of the idea. He wrote for The Free Market and spoken several times at Mises Institute events.

It’s fascinating to look at the long-term trend of public regard for the media establishment. In the days of Watergate, three channels, the Cold War, and Walter Cronkite (oh what Hell it was to be alive then!), 3/4 said the media was trustworthy and only 1/4 said it was untrustworthy. Today, fully 57% say that major media is spouting baloney while only 43% are still to trust and obey. This is a major way in which the world has changed since the Internet.

Since WWII perhaps the most potent strain of anti-capitalist, anti-Western ideology has been powered by the conceptions of Hobson and Lenin as much as by those of Marx and the Webbs. On this view, capitalism and its need for markets and profits drives the violent and unjust economic exploitation of non-Western nations and peoples.

Through this ideological filter the dream of socialism became fused to the moral causes of anti-colonialism, and — ironically — both ethnic nationalism and anti-Western internationalism.

[Excerpted from chapter 10 of Theory and History.]

Ordinarily I agree with John Stossel. Stossel does what many would have thought impossible: he uses economic reasoning to defend individual liberty and free markets on national media outlets. In a 2008 article Stossel claims that uniformed people should not vote. Stossel illustrates this idea by questioning audience members at a Rock the Vote concert.

Confession time: I still read newspapers the old-fashioned way, meaning the way my father and grandfather did, on paper, frequently at the kitchen table, and to the smell of a hot, Honduran coffee.

I have various reasons for not yet giving in completely to the digital delivery of news. The paper I read, the Birmingham News, is a good though not great paper, and although my cost of delivery has increased during the Great Recession, I consider its coverage of the state to be indispensable for my work in the areas of teaching and research.

[From Our Enemy, the State]