For years, the environmentalists have been trying to have it both ways, claiming that in the midst of the global warming that they allege, Europe might suffer an ice age. According to this scenario, ships would sail through an ice-free Arctic Ocean but be unable to unload their cargos in the ice-bound ports of Northern Europe.

In all the discussions across the internet about Ron Paul and his views it seems there still remains a lot of confusion.

Here is just one example:

Wherever two boys swap tops for marbles, that is the marketplace. The simple barter, in terms of human happiness, is no different from a trade transaction involving banking operations, insurance, ships, railroads, wholesale and retail establishments; for in any case the effect and purpose of trade is to make up a lack of satisfactions. The boy with a pocketful of marbles is handicapped in the enjoyment of life by his lack of tops, while the other is similarly discomfited by his need for marbles; both have a better time of it after the swap.

[This address was given before the Mont Pelerin Society at St. Moritz, Switzerland, on September 4, 1957.]

We are still, writes Murray Rothbard, suffering from the delusion of Woodrow Wilson: that “democracies” ipso facto will never embark on war, and that “dictatorships” are always prone to engage in war. Much as we may and do abhor the domestic programs of most dictators (and certainly of the Nazis and Communists), this has no necessary relation to their foreign policies: indeed, many dictatorships have been passive and static in history, and, contrariwise, many democracies have led in promoting and waging war. Revisionism may, once and for all, be able to destroy this Wilsonian myth.

For information: [I have posted this elsewhere ] ------------------------------------

[This essay was published in Essays on Liberty, VIII (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1961), pp.255–261, and in The Freeman, June 1961, pp. 40–44.) It was republished in The Logic of Action Two (Edward Elgar, 1997, pp. 180 184). Rothbard had developed a similar argument in “The Politics of Political Economists: Comment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 74, 4 (November 1960), pp. 659–665, a critique of some theses put forward by economist George Stigler.]

A month after declaring travel on the stretch of New York State Thruway that crosses its land an “ongoing act of trespass,” the Seneca Indian Nation said Thursday it will charge the state a $1 toll for each vehicle traveling the highway.

The action is the latest in a series by Seneca leaders angry at Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plans to collect an estimated $200 million in tax from reservation sales of gasoline, cigarettes and other goods to non-Indian customers.