If you can’t yet find all of Murray Rothbard’s writing on Mises.org, the gap is small and closing. For those of us who discovered Rothbard through his books, it is especially fun to see the seeds of certain chapters sewn a decade or two earlier in letters to the Volker Fund, letters to and short articles for The Freeman, or as brief editorials in his own newsletters, Left & Right, and Libertarian Forum.
The coercive recycling structure is set up in layers, where the consumer (”producer” of waste) gets to do most of the work of sorting, cleaning, and transporting the trash to collection centers. Government-appointed companies then empty the containers and transport the materials to regional centers where the trash is prepared for recycling. And then everything is transported to centralized recycling plants where the materials are prepared for reuse or burning.
My recent article “A Creditors’ Protection Bill” has been criticized because of its call for the insertion of a partial gold clause into existing contracts, with or without the consent of debtors. The criticism is that this would be an interference with the freedom of contract.
[This essay was originally published in Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, edited by John V. Denson, pp. 667–696.
I tried to post this as a reply to the criticism of my criticism of Frank Shostak’s money supply definition that the person calling himself Newson posted under Frank’s most recent article. It strangely disappeared so that’s why it’s posted under a new post (slightly reformulated since it is a new post rather than a comment under a post): First of all, I am not the only Austrian economist who thinks that Shostak’s definition of the supply of money is too narrow.
An American liberal like Kinsley should (after 6+ years of the “War on Terror”) be aware of the great downside to a government monopoly of the military. Everything that is wrong with government control of, say, automobile production, carries over into the arena of defense. For example, costs are vastly inflated, and inefficiency abounds, because there is no direct link between the customer and the service provider.
