War and Foreign Policy

The Lou Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics.

Somehow I had forgotten that the U.S. has a thing going on in Somalia.

Recorded at the Mises Circle in Houston: “Great Economic Myths,” Saturday 26 January 2008; Sponsored by Jeremy S.

The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised—a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.

Two world wars have converted the libertarian American dream of pre-1914 days into a nightmare of fear, regimentation, destruction, insecurity, inflation, and ultimate insolvency.

Barnes was the Complete Historian; and it was the historical approach that informed his work in all the other social science disciplines in which he was so remarkably productive: sociology, criminology, religion, economics, current affairs, and social thought.

An unwise and overambitious foreign policy, and particularly the effort to do more than we are able to do, is the one thing which might in the end destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States….

There is no question that the War on Terror will last forever. Just like the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty. "War is the health of the state," as Randolph Bourne famously said.