Prohibition and the New Deal are alike in their professed intention. Both assumed the guise of disinterested benevolence towards the body politic. We are judged incapable of setting up an adequate social defense against vicious rum-sellers and malefactors of great wealth.
Our health and living standards have virtually nothing to do with charity and virtually everything to do with entrepreneurs solving problems. Had we depended on only alms and goodwill to elevate our living standards, we would still be squatting in mud huts.
I want to focus on how these times relate to history and how we can change the future by applying the economic way of thinking. I am therefore going to draw your attention to four different themes.
The first self-conscious school of economic thought developed in France shortly after the publication of Cantillon's <i>Essai</i>. They called themselves "the economists" but later came to be called the "physiocrats," after their prime politico-economical principle: physiocracy (the rule of nature).
If we are going to look at the current, dismal economy and blame somebody's policies for it, surely we can acquit Ron Paul. That doesn't by itself prove that Ron Paul's views are correct, but it certainly casts doubt on Krugman's constant claims.
The first self-conscious school of economic thought developed in France shortly after the publication of Cantillon’s Essai.
The envy-driven masses do not care a whit for what the demagogues call the "bourgeois" concern for freedom of conscience, of thought, of the press, for habeas corpus, trial by jury, and all the rest. They long for the earthly paradise that the socialist leaders promise them.
As "left" and "right" categories dissolve and become increasingly meaningless on the American ideological scene, as young people, with the collapse of both the SDS-Left and the liberal "consensus," grope toward a new philosophy and a new orientation, right-libertarianism may ascend.
Legal or not, destruction is animal-like behavior. It's one thing when it is done by wild pigs. But when identical forms of destruction are sponsored by the state, we are talking about a form of brutality that is purely man-made.
