There are some things that a state just cannot do, no matter how much power it accumulates or employs. There has been no shortage of rhetoric. No expense is spared on arms escalation. There is no lack of will. The effort has the backing of plenty of smart people. It is backed by threats of massive bloodshed. But, in the end, the war on terror cannot work.
Many intellectuals believe that war is good for many things, including fixing up a weak economy, writes Adam Young. The coming invasion and occupation of Iraq will happen because the Bush administration believes in the Keynesian/Great Depression myth of perpetual war for perpetual prosperity.
The statement given by the Bush administration to Congress and now available online, entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," must be read to be believed, writes Joseph Stromberg. Its historical points are dubious, its economics misleading, and its social theory a heap of dangerous half- or third-truths.
In point of fact, terms like "dove" and "hawk" have little substantive meaning when applied to the Federal Reserve. Robert McTeer's unrelenting inflationism is considered dovish, while Laurence Mayer is labeled a complete hawk on TheStreet.com's Fed Scorecard, despite the fact that he has yet to cast a dissenting vote!
Abraham Lincoln is incorrectly remembered as a restorer of liberty, while Prussian autocrat Otto von Bismarck is generally seen as a ruthless dictator, eager to sacrifice men to his policy of deciding the future of his countrymen "by blood and iron." Contrary to this view, Adam Young explains why both men should be viewed as allied together in the common cause of destroying the principles of classical liberalism.
As the war on terror drags on, many people calling themselves libertarians have decided that it's not such a bad thing after all. What, they ask, is the point of government if not to bomb those who would threaten our safety? The trouble is that real life works a little differently from the civics-text ideal of government. Government uses war—and sometimes foments it—in order to expand its power over its own people or to expand its imperial power.
Based on the record of deceit documented by Robert Caro in his book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, Lyndon Baines Johnson was an evil man even before his disastrous presidency--a presidency in which he and his minions misled Americans into the Vietnam War, a presidency that nearly caused a civil war in this country.
Foreign policy from Truman to the Reagan exacted a huge toll on American prosperity, diverting resources and expanding the government's grip on national life, writes Karen De Coster. A new book by Derek Leebaert sizes up the actual price that we paid for granting government military planners and their connected industries a blank check.
The modern state, by its very nature, is incompetent, self-serving, mendacious, unresponsive, irresponsible, provocative, bellicose, and deadly. Above all, it is unaccountable. Just ask yourself what would happen to a private security firm that permitted a September 11 kind of disaster, even without foreknowledge. Let's just say it wouldn’t get a raise.
The costs that the "War on Drugs" imposes upon people cannot be underestimated. We bear the costs of building and maintaining prisons, and the burdens of creating vast new classes of people who are called criminals because they have engaged in mutually agreeable exchanges with other people.
