[For an audio version of this talk, see March 20th’s episode of Radio Rothbard.]

Over the weekend President Trump ordered a massive military operation against the small country of Yemen. Was Yemen in the process of attacking the United States? No. Did the President in that case go to Congress and seek a declaration of war against the country? No. The fact is, Yemen hadn’t even threatened the United States before the bombs started falling.

“We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” proclaimed Sheria Smith, the president of American Federation of Government Employees unit representing more than a thousand federal Education Department employees fired by the Trump administration.

A war economy is characterized, above all, by an extremely high time preference (i.e., a focus on the present). The conduct of war requires that scarce resources—previously allocated to the production of capital or consumer goods—be reallocated to the mobilization and operational readiness of the nation’s fighting forces. As Mises said, “War can be waged only with present goods.”

Why should we care today about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963? That fateful day in Dallas is, after all, a long time ago: those of us, like me, who can remember the day are at least in their sixties. The short answer is that it reveals something essential for us to know about the American government and the Deep State that runs it.

I’ve been thrilled with much of what Donald Trump has done as president.

On January 20th, the Trump administration indicated it would pause foreign aid to most countries for 90 days. Newly-confirmed Secretary of State, “Little” Marco Rubio, confirmed this and paused “all new obligations of funding, pending a review, for (U.S.) foreign assistance programs funded by or through the Department and USAID.”

[This article is the introduction to The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought, by Ralph Raico, now available in the Mises Book Store, online at mises.org, and at Amazon.com.]

Thomas Aquinas is, without doubt, the greatest Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian when it comes to the depth of his thought and the degree of his influence. Although this is the case, it might seem strange at first to see him mentioned in relation to the history of the subjective theory of value. It was Rothbard nonetheless who first pointed out that the direct ancestor of the Austrian School is the Salamanca School, a Roman Catholic school of Scholastic philosophy and theology, rooted in and deeply indebted to Aquinas.