[Excerpted from chapter 1 of The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically]

One single force impels all life; one force developed it, from the single cell, the particle of albumen floating about in the warm ocean of prehistoric time, up to the vertebrates, and then to man. This one force is the tendency to provide for life, bifurcated into “hunger and love.”

An incredible article appeared on Times Live today, authored by Iv0 Vegter, featuring a quote by Per Bylund. The piece addressed the issue of Zimbabweans illegally immigrating to South Africa to escape the economic hardship imposed by their dictator. The piece not only addresses the specific case of South Africa but also migration as a whole.

Vegter concludes that free, unrestricted, unconditional movement of labor is in the best interest of consumers and allows for a higher standard of living.

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.]