War and Foreign Policy

In the literature of the American Revolution there is no demagogic attempt to set human rights against property rights.

The point, once more, is not that the conservatives deployed bad arguments against the supposed extremism of Mises and Rothbard. Rather, they downgraded the role of reason as such; and this rendered ineffective their resistance to the Left.

The notion that only the state can provide an adequate defense is but one more statist myth — perhaps the most dangerous one of all.

The private sector can't do this, which is precisely why all the stuff that makes life worth living is produced privately, and all that the government does is slow down the progress of civilization and bring destruction and disaster wherever it goes.

"An authoritarian state can never be peaceful because it can never be healthy; even if such a nation is unable to carry on a war against other nations, it is still at war with its own citizens."

Once the war began, Lincoln conducted himself as a thoroughgoing dictator, and DiLorenzo gives a full account of the president's suppression of civil liberties.

The Communists rebuff any connection with the bourgeoisie. Even if the Front Populaire were to be renewed, an affiliation with the Communists would hardly be realizable for monarchists.

From the point of view of a cynical world the American who entered two world wars and won them both, when his own interest was not paramount, was either an inscrutable hypocrite or an unbelievable romantic, and in either case a dangerous possessor of the world's ultimate power.

We may not even be fortunate enough to have any market readjustment at some time in the future. Instead, spurred on by people who have lost all sense of economic reality, the government may take complete control of the economy. Then, true enough, there will be no depression and unemployment in the accepted sense; but the alternative is not pleasant to contemplate.

Although Mises's books were often criticized severely when they appeared, his analyses of market operations, money, inflation, government intervention, and Communism, all firmly based on human action principles, live on and are gaining increasingly serious attention from scholars.