One of the most brilliant and forceful attacks on Cold War foreign policy in the postwar era came from the pen of the veteran free-market publicist Garet Garrett.

For a wholly unabashed defence of full-blown Collectivism, the speech reproduced under the title ‘Modern Governments Must’ in American Affairs takes some beating, incorporating, as it does, every Keynesian fallacy and ‘fatal conceit’ you could imagine, including the chilling assertion that:

One great discovers another: Garet Garrett reviews two books by Ludwig von Mises in this newly discovered essay from 1945. Garrett writes: Ludwig von Mises writes tragedy in the language of political economy. There is in man the very principle of frustration. Once, and perhaps for the first time, he did find the right way. Beginning with the optimistic social philosophy of 18th-century liberalism he discovered the solutions of the free market, free competition, free private enterprise — that is to say, capitalism — and how at the same time to put government in its place. After that he had only to go in a straight line toward a world of peace and unlimited plenty. For a while he did go in a straight line and there was the 19th century, in which political freedom and material well-being advanced together, inseparably and wonderfully. But the government, which he had put in its place, began to overtake him, offering to do him good and to help him on his way.

[This article is excerpted from chapter 7 of Human Action, available in the store

What was Mises’s most important contribution to economic science? My answer, which coincides with the theme of maybe the central chapter of the entire book — chapter 10, A Copernican Shift, is: his analysis of the exact nature and the importance of economic calculation in a division-of-labor economic system.The substance of his contribution first appeared in a paper titled Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.

Now that Alan Greenspan is no longer the Fed chairman, some financial commentators are daring to suggest that perhaps the present financial crisis is the result of the extremely low interest rate policy of Greenspan’s Fed between December 2000 to June 2004 that fueled the housing bubble. Greenspan denies it on grounds that the Fed has no control over long-term interest rates.

National Review—I can vaguely, hazily recall that this publication has some doubts about the merit of the crusading leviathan state—is throughly disgusted that Ron Paul raised $4.2 million in 24 hours online. It proves that we need not be “impressed by anybody able to gather cash over the net.” It only demonstrates “that lot of people will donate money just to extend a middle finger to the establishment”...and we can’t have that!

Skip Oliva is giving us regular updates on the writers’ guild strike, from an informed perspective. He points particularly to the police-state enforcement tactics of the union itself. Excellent reading.