World History

This is the last formal lecture by Ludwig von Mises delivered May 2, 1970 at an economic seminar in Seattle, Washington.

Foreign policy from Truman to the Reagan exacted a huge toll on American prosperity, diverting resources and expanding the government's grip on national life, writes Karen De Coster. A new book by Derek Leebaert sizes up the actual price that we paid for granting government military planners and their connected industries a blank check.

The most accurate description of the twentieth century is "The War and Welfare Century." This century was the bloodiest in all history. More than 170 million people were killed by governments with ten million being killed in World War I and fifty million killed in World War II. 

Richard Ebeling writes: The rejection of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes around the world has represented a rebirth of the ideal of the democratic order. It is important to remember, however, that "self-government" can mean and has meant two different, but complementary ideals.

Robert Kaplan's newest book seems to be, bottom line, a briefing book to justify the switches and turns, contradictions, and conflicting rationales for American foreign policy and the domestic political control to which it is tightly bound, while freeing the government to to do anything it wants, anywhere in the world it wants.

September 11 was far from the first time that the United States has been targeted by terrorists. In a 1997 report on the scourge of terrorism, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board observed: "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States." Recognizing that fact is crucial to understanding why both terror and the response to terror have become such grave threats to freedom and prosperity.

Through it all, the libertarian theme was the same: liberty for everyone, legal privileges for no one. This is the essence of a free market, but even today it is a message that no faction within the apparatus of the ruling class wants to hear. No matter how divided the factions are among themselves, they form a united front against the libertarian idea, which is the one thing they find most intolerable.

World War I marks one of the great watersheds of modern history.

Gold is the antidote to inflationary money. Gold, its advocates have said through the centuries, protects an individual against the damage caused by the disease called inflation that is created by central banks. Gregory Bresiger reviews Peter Bernstein's attempt to debunk: The Power of Gold: History of an Obsession.

Each time America has become politically involved in the Middle East, the results have been the same: U.S. demonization of a single man grows a once-shadowy or despised crank into a popular hero of the Arab masses--the Arabic or Islamic David that dares to stand up and confront the U.S. oil dominion over the Arab world.