War and Foreign Policy

While searching through my apartment after a tragic fire, under soot and ash, I found these “lost” Rothbard lectures, recorded at NYU in 1979 and 1980.

Bob Murphy uses examples from Dan Carlin’s amazing podcast, Hardcore History, to illustrate the flaws with state-provided military services.

While it’s easy to see how much we’re spending over there, it’s harder to see what we could be doing with all of those resources if we weren’t creating more problems abroad. We need to transform the way we think about our foreign policy and take Bastiat’s cue to try to “see the unseen.”

Those who believe in the free and unhampered market economy should be especially skeptical of war and military action. War, after all, is the ultimate government program.

In 1986, eight governors threatened to veto deployments of state troops to Central America. Washington generals and politicians responded by further destroying state independence and the Second Amendment's militia clause.

We can start dismantling the US empire by giving Guantanamo Bay back to Cuba, followed by a termination of all foreign aid, a closure of all foreign military bases, and an end to regime-change operations around the world.

Despite the manifest failure of the liberal hegemony program, its neoconservative advocates have retained their influence. They are rarely called to account for their mistakes, but continue to be treated as if they are experts.

Any profitable inquiry into the character of the American State must therefore take into account the distinction between making a living by production and gaining a living by predation; that is, between economics and politics.

Writing about the cultural background of Ludwig von Mises, an eminent former compatriot of mine, poses some difficulties: how to present you with a world radically different from yours, a world far away, which in many ways no longer exists.