By just glancing at Latin America’s current gun policies, we see a region that is in desperate need of more pro-gun laws. Countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela offer lurid accounts of what happens when most of the population is effectively disarmed when facing real criminal threats.
Mexican politicians are claiming Mexican nationals are unsafe in the US. Meanwhile, Mexico's homicide rate - fueled by strict gun-control laws - has soared to five times that of the US.
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.
Venezuelan politicians hoping to replace the current regime in Venezuela mostly offer just re-treads of the failed socialism the country has endured for decades.
The theory goes like this: capitalism combines with consumerism and advertising to make us sad, lonely, and forever chasing after material goods. So we consume endlessly and the Machiavellian capitalists reap the rewards. It's not a great theory.
Liberalism has many meanings, but I wish to maintain that the most authentic form of liberalism has been concerned above all with two things: the expansion of a free functioning civil society and the restriction of the activity of the state.
The workers were never enthusiastic about socialism. Socialism was brought to the masses by intellectuals of bourgeois background, dining and wining together in the luxurious London homes and country seats of late Victorian "society."
One of the most instructive of all examples from maritime history is that of privateering, that is, the employment of profit-seeking, private armed ships during wartime.
Unlike the Versailles peace, which failed horribly, the successful episodes of peacemaking — Westphalia, Vienna, and even the process that ended World War II — had in common extended multi-lateral negotiations and compromise.
