The pessimistic scenario is not only that American businessmen, students, and tourists will forever fear to travel in any nation with a Muslim community. It could also mean disinvestment overseas, the further impoverishment of the developing world, a lasting world depression, a world split into major warring blocks, and police-state policies at home.

Recent releases of key economic indicators paint a gloomy economic picture. Year-on-year industrial production fell by 5.8 percent in September, after a fall of 4.6 percent in the previous month. This is the twelfth consecutive decline. The yearly rate of growth in retail sales fell to 0.2 percent in September from 3.7 percent in August. Furthermore, non-farm employment was down by almost 200,000 in September. The GDP’s rate of growth fell to an annual 0.3 percent in Q2, from 1.3 percent in the previous quarter. 

Government is far from the economy’s savior. Rather, it is a parasite, a cancer, that eats away at the wealth of its citizens with its fiat currency, its many billions of dollars of expropriated wealth, and its multitudinous directives.

Following his first airline trip since the September 11 attacks, Mark Thornton gives his account of the federal government’s attempts to regulate and regiment airport and airplane security.

[The following lecture was presented during the Philosophy of Liberty Conference at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, Saturday, September 29, 2001.]

All men are created equal.

When Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, set out to enunciate the philosophical principles underlying the American Revolution—the principles of ‘76, as later generations would call them—that’s the one he put down first, as the foundation and justification of all the rest. Equality—not, as one might expect, liberty.

If the military was all it took to wipe out terrorists, writes Robert Blackstock, Israel would have long ago shut down the PLO, and Britain would have already made Northern Ireland a vacation mecca.

Economists of the Austrian School not only understood that markets can fail if measured by an unrealistic and unrealizable standard. Ludwig von Mises emphasized the “uncertainty inherent in every action.”