The radical classical liberals of the past were not so naive as to think that words on paper would prevent the abuses of the central state. Allowing the central state to have a monopoly on coercive power is always a mistake.
Audio Mises Wire
Audio recordings of Mises Wire articles, offering contemporary news and opinion through the lens of Austrian economics and libertarian political economy.
The Duke Lacrosse Case would never have been a legal item had not the police and prosecutors of the case lied and broken the law on numerous occasions. Here is a small sampling of the lies they told.
As we celebrate the Centennial of the birth of Murray Rothbard, we look at his commentary on the American Revolution, where it promoted liberty and where the creation of the Constitution became liberty’s roadblock.
The current US conflict with Iran has its roots in the CIA-backed coup in 1953, which removed a democratically-elected prime minister and replaced him with the Shah. The Shah’s government ultimately collapsed, leading to the current Islamic republic.
It has been 20 years since the Duke Lacrosse Case dominated the news media. It was a story in which false narratives of guilt pushed by corrupt police and prosecutors, radical members of Duke’s faculty, and the legacy media nearly railroaded three innocent men into prison.
Those who believe in the free and unhampered market economy should be especially skeptical of war and military action. War, after all, is the ultimate government program.
The current war is a timely reminder that the US ruling elites regard the US taxpayers and ordinary Americans as little more than inconvenient afterthoughts in US foreign policy.
Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there came, on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.
Are we emphasizing “the negative”? In a sense, yes, but what else are we to stress when our values, our principles, our very being are under attack from a relentless foe?
When the Massachusetts colony issued its own unredeemable paper money in 1690, it was with the promise that it would soon be redeemable in specie. Like all paper money issued by government, it lost value and the confidence of the people.
We are told that the Bill of Rights is the bedrock of our freedom, yet this same Bill of Rights ultimately has been used as a weapon against state sovereignty and against our individual rights.
The current outburst of protests against President Trump’s enforcement of immigration laws is overshadowing a question that is not being asked: Can we defend having national borders in the first place?
Human action involves people engaging in unique events in which outcomes often are uncertain, when expertise and planning often do not give us the results we anticipate.
In a truly free market, there is no class conflict. In the presence of the state, however, things are different because various groups jockey with each other to gain the favor of state agents.
The rise of the grooming gangs in Great Britain and the refusal of Britain’s Labor government to intervene speaks volumes about the contempt that British political elites have for their laws and the people who must live under a regime of anarcho-tyranny.
Governments at all levels abuse their “privilege” of eminent domain, the taking of private property for government use. Murray Rothbard understood that government was not justified to seize property for such use in the first place.
Before Murray Rothbard, there was Albert Jay Nock laying intellectual broadsides against the tyranny of the state. While Nock (unlike Rothbard) never called for total abolishment of the state, he did want as minimal a state as could be had.
Unfortunately, slavery was not just propped up by policy in the slave states, but federally. It is often overlooked that the federal government—not just slave states—had implemented legal protections of slavery by policy for decades.
Few Americans today realize that until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, US senators were appointed by their state legislatures, not by popular vote. This development had an unfortunate effect upon US politics, further damaging the original federalist governing arrangement.
