War and Foreign Policy

The centralized, executive state makes corruption at the top a political inevitability.

Freedom Betrayed is a spirited polemic in support of a contradictory thesis.

The contributors to this outstanding volume have grasped a simple but unfashionable truth: war is a great evil. 

Free trade and peace go together; protectionism is the handmaiden of war. These were key teachings of the early classical economists, as well as the Austrians. Consistent libertarians have never doubted it. But recently the theory has come under fire from all sides—and led to dangerous coalitions pushing for the worst of all worlds, autarky and military belligerence.

The Clinton administration has targeted a new batch of global enemies. It wants to crush them with the usual mix of negotiation, treaty, and enforcement through spying, fines, and propaganda. It's all in a day's work for the "world's indispensable nation"—the administration's new name for itself.

It is no surprise that a bureaucracy would study itself and conclude that neither its budget nor its policies should change. Neither is it a shock that the Pentagon has bypassed the question of why we need to involve ourselves in any foreign wars. After all, the U.S. long ago abandoned the Constitutional ideal of a strictly defensive military posture.

Great Britain learned an important lesson from World War I. 

Ever since World War II, the traditional American foreign policy of nonintervention in foreign affairs has had a bad press. 

The rise in oil prices provoked a frenzy of opportunistic posturing by politicians of both parties. Yet neither Clinton nor Dole will acknowledge the real reasons for sustained high prices—taxes and environmental regulations designed to keep prices high—or the reason for the newest price rise itself. Both are complicit in their genesis, and both are conspiring to keep gas prices high and prevent American consumers from getting relief

The death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown in a Balkans plane crash exposed the real reason President Clinton sent American troops to Bosnia: to make the world safe for corporate welfare.