Socialism

Excerpts from the 2025 Memorial Lectures presented at the Austrian Economics Research Conference in Auburn, Alabama.

The covid-19 pandemic gave rise to widespread lockdowns and some of the greatest peacetime infringements on personal liberties in history.

The Green New Deal was proposed in 2019 and became the legislative centerpiece of the Biden administration. Like the first New Deal, it has garnered favorable media coverage, legislative hype, unkept promises, and a dismal track record.

“It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used.”

If “consent” is said to be meaningless due to its supposed tampering by capitalist forces, the same logic could be applied to “rebellion,” with the only difference being that it now comes from the left.

Herbert Marcuse took pride in his dense, but incomplete writings on philosophy. Dr. Gordon examines Jacob McNulty‘s futile attempt to interpret the thinking of someone who supported Marxian socialism but never successfully explained it.

While Ben Bernanke has accused free market and sound money advocates of pursuing “discredited” systems, he and his lieutenants were following a truly discredited way of thinking: socialism. The man who supposedly “saved the world” actually destabilized it.

Portugal's Estado Novo regime under António de Oliveira Salazar was lauded by some classical liberals for allegedly saving the nation from socialism. However, as Paulo Ferreira writes, for all practical purposes it was a socialist government.

Socialists have always tried to hide the true nature of socialism, presenting it as a mechanism to advance freedom when, in fact, it destroys liberty. Socialism needs to be unmasked.

History has shown that prosperity is built through economic freedom and self-reliance—not through perpetual financial transfers from former colonial powers.