Freethought, de Cleyre wrote, was "the right to believe as the evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe. This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any subject."
"In 1943 the Census Bureau divulged data that was used to identify Japanese Americans, who were then confined in concentration camps for the remaining duration of World War II — a fact that was suppressed by the bureau for over 50 years."
"Most of the essays in this book imagine radical new possibilities of living outside the status quo. Or perhaps we should say statist quo…"
If anyone is to take the blame for the current mess in which European countries find themselves, it should not be the bearers of bad news but those who steered the affected economies in the unsustainable direction.
Who then will bear witness in court? Whoever wishes to do so, freely and voluntarily.
A system of private-property rights over all else would be a better solution.
"If this mania increases we shall slide into a social order under which everyone has one hand in the pocket of another."
Reading groups can use Mises.org to provide most of the necessary resources free of charge — or at worst for relatively little cost — while they spread libertarianism to people that would have otherwise not stumbled upon it by surfing the Internet.
"Mercantilist 'theory' was a set of rationales designed to uphold or expand particular vested economic interests."
The fact is that, exactly as Mark Lilla fears, when people distrust authority in a generalized way and start thinking for themselves, often without much relevant information to guide them, they'll make many decisions that they'll later regret. But whose decisions are they to make?
