It’s been a grueling Fall 2007, with the continued shocks from the housing mess, the market sell-off, oil still sky high, the dollar hitting new lows, and the rising gold price giving that ever-ominous sign of trouble ahead. Business conditions have deteriorated dramatically. And the gold price reflects a general trend: the consumer and producer price indexes are continuing an uptrend that compares to the steep levels of the mid and late 1970s. And if you really want to wince, take a look at federal spending and debt.

Paul Gottfried’s excellent book lends strong support to a controversial claim of Murray Rothbard’s. In his The Betrayal of the American Right (Mises Institute, 2007), Rothbard argues that the American Old Right could not be considered conservative in the European sense.

It’s been a grueling Fall 2007, with the continued shocks from the housing mess, the market sell-off, oil still sky high, the dollar hitting new lows, and the rising gold price giving that ever-ominous sign of trouble ahead. Business conditions have deteriorated dramatically.

Americans are in the midst of heated presidential nomination battles, with leading candidates competing to buy the most votes with ever-more promises to abuse liberty for one or another special interest group. Except for occasional boilerplate obeisance to freedom, none of them are proposing anything like it. It makes one wish to hear what kind of addresses a presidential candidate who was a true lover of liberty might give.

One of the few memorable quotes from last nights GOP debate came from Mike Huckabee. In describing the “earthly benefits” devolped by NASA:

The Thinking about Thinking blog has thoughts.

Robert Taft, champion of a non-interventionist foreign policy and leader of the Republican resistance to post-FDR foreign policy, gave a stirring speech against conscription in 1946. There is one step now proposed, supported by government propaganda, which seems to me to strike at the very basis of freedom. It is the proposal that we establish compulsory military training in time of peace. The power to take a boy from his home and subject him to complete government discipline is the most serious limitation on freedom that can be imagined. Many who have accepted the idea favor a similar government-controlled training for all girls....Military conscription is essentially totalitarian.