World History

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.

The net profit of reform is the accumulation of State power; the net loss is borne by Society.

Public housing, planned cities, government power plants, and coerced unionism were all part of the great cooperation between corporations and government through WWI and WWII.

Mises illustrates his case with a review of the fall of Germany, from the collapse of classical liberalism to the rise of nationalism and socialism

If capitalism is self-destroying, as he says it is, if socialism leads to the servile state, and if the distributive state as a practical matter is not feasible, then we have but one choice; and that is a choice between serfdom and death.

Finally, this view, based only on the doctrines of one obscure and heterodox scholastic, was enshrined in conventional histories of economic thought, where it was seconded by the free market but fanatically anti-Catholic economist Frank Knight and his followers in the now highly influential Chicago School.

Ayn Rand's books sell between eight hundred thousand and a million copies a year. Her first novel We the Living was admired by Mencken. Night of January 16th opened on Broadway. Her major novel The Fountainhead (1943) was "masterful". Atlas Shrugged (1957) was Rand's magnus opus.