Beginning in 2007 and culminating in 2008, the home-ownership myth was smashed, as values all over the country plummeted, wiping out a primary means of savings and instilling shock and awe all across the country. The thing that was never supposed to happen had happened.
The environment determines the situation but not the response. To the same situation different modes of reacting are thinkable and feasible. Which one the actors choose depends on their individuality.
Benjamin Franklin once remarked that the only certain things in life are death and taxes. Modern entitlement programs have created a situation in which efforts to avoid death will make tax burdens unbearable.
The connotation of unreality that the word has acquired follows from the fact that every utopia ignores the central operating lever of man: he seeks to satisfy his desires with the least expenditure of effort.
When he was in his 20s, having newly discovered libertarian ideas, having read Rand, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, and others, having met Rothbard and conversed with him at length, Nozick was fired up with excitement.
A pure gold standard is not conducive to business cycles. Contrary to mainstream economists, it is the attempts of the central banks to bring about price stability and full employment that set in motion the menace of boom-bust cycles.
Just as, for them, liberty must be the highest political end, peace must be the highest end of foreign policy.
What are the results of the patent system itself? The results are distorted research, protectionism, wealth transfers, and enrichment of the patent bar. Large companies, such as IBM, amass giant patent portfolios.
Murray Rothbard, in his life, was known as Mr. Libertarian. We can make a solid case that the title now belongs to Walter Block, a student of Rothbard's whose own vita is as thick as a phone book, as diverse as Wikipedia.
We must face the fact, once and for all, that the argument of economists against the draft, though correct as far as it goes, is hopelessly narrow and inadequate.
