Conscription of Men, Women, and Resources

Compulsory service is slavery by definition. Call a spade a spade. Milton Friedman did when he referred to the conscripted army that was fighting in Vietnam as an army of slaves. They were: they went to Vietnam as a result of threats against life and limb. Some who took a principled stand against the war and in line with their convictions, like Muhammad Ali, were stripped of some of the most productive years of their lives.

The Myths of Capitalism’s History

Hayek pointed out that the historical discontinuity that appeared during the era that we loosely call “industrialization” was that people came to expect economic progress rather than stagnation as the natural course of things. Regular people up through the 18th century could expect to see no economic progress during their lifetimes. Today, we are disappointed when economic growth is slower than we expect.

The Destruction of Capitalism (and Civilization)

I fear that we are seeing now in the United States what Mises called “a return to barbarism.” Rhetoric about “working together” and understanding our common responsibilities is superficially appealing, but it is fundamentally divisive. Embedded in these statements are assumptions about who is to serve and who is to be served. It does not recognize the fundamental and ennobling effects of capitalism.

I Wrote the Guide to Extend Rothbard

As great as Rothbard’s book is, he ends with the Hoover administration. So I extend the Austrian analysis to explain the failures of the New Deal. For example, the official unemployment rate in 1938 averaged 19 percent. Inasmuch as Roosevelt was sworn in five years earlier in 1933, this is a rather damning indictment of the New Deal as a recovery program.

Dr. Paul on Maddow Show

Rep. Ron Paul had a very nice conversation with Rachel Maddow on topics ranging from the GOP to H.R. 1207 (bill to audit the Federal Reserve).

View the video here.*

 

* Note: The part of the video directly concerning Dr. Paul begins at approximately the 3:05 mark.

For more information about H.R. 1207, including the full text and a list of cosponsors, is available here.

A Tribute to Jack Kemp

He had read Mises and Hayek, and believed in the idea of freedom. His mistake was in thinking that freedom was something granted by the right configuration of government policy, not something that exists in the absence of government policy. Naïvely did he choose the arena of politics to work out his intellectual passions but the political world was not kind to him, no matter how kind he was to it.

Is Sully Too Old to Fly?

Sully is someone I’d want flying my plane, and for all I know, he and others like him have. Unfortunately for me and for you, he has been spending his time lately in courtrooms instead of cockpits, defending his right to work to those who, if they had their way, would be cheering his pending retirement.

Obama Sounds Like an Echo

How on earth did Obama get to claim the mantle of “peace” candidate? Anyone hoping for a change from the violent delusion of neoconservatism will find only an echo in Barack Obama. This is not to our advantage, since a great orator can explain away a lot of guilt and allow even more room for disastrous ignorance.

“The Yield from Money Held” Reconsidered

Franz Cuhel occupies an honored place in the history of economic thought and of the “Viennese” or “Austrian” School of economics in particular. In his book Zur Lehre von den Bedürfnissen (1907), Cuhel presented for the first time a strictly ordinal interpretation of marginal utility and thus contributed to a systematic advance of pure economic theory. Since this lecture is named in Cuhel’s honor, I felt it appropriate that I, too, should discuss here a purely theoretical problem of economics.

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