The President today, writes Adam Young, is the focus of political and increasingly social life. He is presented to the public as an all-purpose master of every issue and situation, a veritable demigod in his reputation for near omniscience and infallibility.
Among American political theorists and philosophers, Michael Walzer has won recognition as the foremost authority on just war theory.
Debate over Mises’s socialist calculation argument has been going on since 1920, and one might have thought that at this late date, it would be difficult to say something new. Bryan Caplan has done exactly that.
Under Alan Greenspan's rule at the Fed, the function of the central bank as a bailout institution has experienced a new golden age, writes Antony Mueller.
Americans have something in common with Iraqis, writes Lew Rockwell: experience has told us that when the government promises to bring us security, it means only that it wants more control over our lives.
A tariff set the stage for the American Civil War. The quarrel between the North and the South was a fiscal quarrel, not a war over slavery. The tariff of 1828 was called the tariff of abomination. Nullification was a strong argument to void unconstitutional federal laws.
Lack of intelligence, lack of division of labor and violent ideologies are three factors which contribute to states, wars, and imperialism. Fighters in wars were vassals of the Lords, or mercenary groups who could be hired. Fights were frequent but small and they had rules of knightly honor.
Gustave de Molinari became the grand old man of classical liberalism, crediting Pareto. Molinari understood that the main issue in the Civil War was the tariff, not slavery. In Italy economists founded free market economics, crediting Bastiat.
Germany surrendered conditionally in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Everybody opposed the treaty, but it was forcibly implemented. Revisionism is necessary to combat state propaganda, e.g. the lie in WWII that FDR was surprised by Pearl Harbor.
It was thought that the ultimate antidote to war was universal democracy. It was not. Spencer defined liberal democracy as an individual free to control the product of his own efforts on the market. Welfare societies could not rationally be termed democracies.
