World History

The most charming city on the Rhine — one of the most charming in all Germany or in the whole wide world for that matter — is the city of Bonn.

In this country today, and it is also true of most other nations, many professional historians gladly falsify history quite voluntarily.

Recorded on 31 January 1981 at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The governments of almost all countries are engaged in a campaign against the capitalists. They are intent upon expropriating them by means of taxation and monetary measures.

"In Thomist thought, reason and empiricism are not separated but allied and interwoven. Truth is built up by reason on a solid groundwork in empirically known reality. The rational and empirical were integrated into one coherent whole."

"The fragment on classes was actually written prior to the initial publication of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867. Marx died in 1883. That he never returned to the fragment strongly suggests that he had no satisfactory theory of class."

The political machine is familiar to Americans. While it may lead to gross abuses, experience shows that some sort of behind-the-scenes organization may be useful to the functioning of democratic institutions.

In the course of lengthy arguing against hidden usury in various forms of contracts, the brilliant mind of San Bernardino stumbles, for one of the first times in history, upon what later would be called 'time-preference'.

Alexander Gray (1882–1968) is my favorite historian of economic thought.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is thought to be the greatest work of the 20th century with 150 million readers. The book's thesis - Evil power cannot be defeated by power - is libertarian.