War and Foreign Policy

Father Webster and Professor Cole have spoiled what could have been an excellent book; Laurence Vance, besides much else in his remarkable collection of essays, helps us see what is wrong with it.

Lew Rockwell shares some thoughts on the rise of red-state fascism in America, and the libertarian response.

 Laurence M. Vance discusses War & Morality at the 2005 Austrian Scholars Conference  Author’s Forum.

Black reconstruction after the Civil War did much better than the dire predictions made. The black population recovered quickly. Many moved to urban areas. They deliberately had fewer children. Mortality declined. Income increased. No government assistance was handed out.

There was a sea change in money and banking in the U.S. as a result of the Civil War. Government became the primary regulator. Metal coins gave way to paper. Mistakes of one bank infected others – it was contagion.

Inflation is a giant rip off, a stealth tax stealing purchasing power. Money is not neutral. The first receivers of new money benefit. Savers and those on fixed incomes struggle. From 1857 until the war was a period of “free banking” where the fed had nothing to do with the banks and the states had little control over them. High economic growth and prosperity prevailed.

Recorded at the Austrian Economics and Financial Markets conference at The Venetian Hotel Resort Casino, Las Vegas, 02-18-2005

The Confederate government blockaded the Southern economy by bad policies like impressment and trying to run the blockade themselves. The government declared that fifty percent of all cargo space had to be for the Confederate government.

How does any political movement that begins by being opposed to the state avoid being absorbed by the state? The most crucial step, writes Lew Rockwell, is to decide what you are for and what you are against from the very outset.