For some unknown reason, some of Wilhelm Röpke’s best work has long been out of print, including his 1959 book International Order and Economic Integration (maybe the title alone killed the book!). In any case, in prepping the volume for online availability, I can’t resist quoting this passionate statement about how the early generation of socialists had embraced the state that had created the war that they so hated (WWI).

Mystery solved. I first heard about the deadly flu pandemic of 1918 in an obscure blues song from that era. As I learned more about it, like that it was the worst pandemic in world history, I wondered why there was relative silence about this horrifying event, relative to, say, World War I and the Great Depression about which any schoolchild learns. Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac gives this rather strong clue:

The story of the debacle at Walter Reed that the Washington Post broke has generated commentary all over the place.

Finally, the private sector figures out how to move people around from home to work in buses: $0, wireless internet, leather seats, and more. Looking at the failure of mass transit in the past, one might be led to believe that individual cars are the only market solution. But this Google experiment shows that the problem isn’t the means of transport so much as government management and ownership.

As reported and summarized here, a divided three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit has ruled “that the District of Columbia’s gun control laws violate individuals’ Second Amendment rights”.

In Jan Narveson’s thought-provoking and elegantly-written The Libertarian Idea (1990), he discusses an admission by a Marxist, G.A. Cohen, of a serious problem with communal ownership of property. As Narveson notes (p.

Timothy Noah’s Would You Privatize Defense?The case for socialized medicine, Part 1, in the March 6, 2007 Slate unwittingly shows the danger of minarchism and the idea of public goods. Once you accept the notion that the state is legitimate and there are some public goods, then the door is open to argue that more and more domains of private life should be considered public goods and thus handled by the state. In short, any sort of state-advocacy, including minarchy, is a recipe for socialism.

The events in recent months in Venezuela provide a textbook example of statolatry—the term popularized by Ludwig von Mises in Omnipotent Government about tendencies to make government and its figureheads objects of veneration. This week’s Economist magazine reports (in an article on Hugo Chávez efforts to form a socialist ruling coalition in Venezuela):

I learned a new word from the TV yesterday. “Perp” — like, “he’s the perp who solved the long lines at the grocery checkout counter by blowing away ten patrons.” “Perp” — a “perpect” word for our non-judgemental society. Not hoodlum, thug, or even criminal. Just Perp. Short for perpetrator — a doer, you might say. A word bereft of ethical connotations.