In a long public life, Ron Paul has always kept faith with the limited defensible role for our federal government. He hasn’t sold out that vision to “buy” goodies extorted from others via government coercion, truly representing those disenchanted with the ballooning size scope of government. As a result, he has been criticized, including by those in his own party, for failing to “go along to get along” or look the other way at poorly thought out proposals and policies, both foreign and domestic.

[This article is excerpted from the first two chapters of The Enterprise of Law.]

I. Basic Causes of the Revolution

The historian must be more than a chronicler, a mere lister of events. For his real task is discovering and setting forth the causal connections between events in human history, the complex chain of human purposes, choices, and consequences over time that have shaped the fate of mankind. Investigating the causes of such a portentous event as the American Revolution is more, then, than a mere listing of preceding occurrences; for the historian must weigh the causal significance of these factors, and select those of overriding importance.

Oh how one could wish this came from The Onion:

When I first read Chodorov’s Rise and Fall of Society, excerpted today as the Daily Article, I was just blown away at the clarity of argument and the precision of the analytics concerning government, society, and economy. How much could be achieved if a student read this one book sometime in the first years of college?

Ian Baldwin and Frank Bryan write in The Washington Post:

The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State.

Life without international trade: using local labor and materials only, a suit takes 500 man-hours to produce. And it’s not exactly high-quality. But what a great teaching project by Kelly Cobb of Drexel University.

Here’s the story from Wired.

Thank goodness for congressional committees, and the committees’ subcommittees. To think, Google almost got away with the crime of the century.

ABC News is reporting that “A congressional subcommittee accused Google on Friday of ‘airbrushing history’ by replacing post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its popular map portal with images of the region taken before the storm’s devastation.”

This is one you might not expect, one that will leave you speechless.

From the NYT review of Doherty’s new book on libertarianism, we find that Bush has been using a “free-market approach to rebuilding Iraq” but that this “has proven disastrous.”

In 10 Austrian Vices and How to Avoid Them, Peter Leeson offers advice such as

1. Stop block quoting Mises and Hayek ...

4. No more discussions about the calculation debate. ...

5. Get over the “subjectivism stuff.” ...

8. Do not engage (i.e., make the focus of your research) work that is more than 25 years old. ...

9. Don’t tell us what Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, etc. “really meant.”

10. Stick a fork in the “philosophy talk.”