The history of the 19th and 20th centuries has discredited the hopes and the prognostications of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The peoples did not proceed on the road toward freedom, constitutional government, civil rights, free trade, peace, and good will among nations.
The Lincoln regime destroyed the system of federalism, or states' rights, that was established by the founding fathers. After the war, the union was no longer voluntary, and all states, North and South, became mere appendages of Washington, DC.
The Chinese communists are quite right when they accuse Khrushchev of flirting with capitalism. If he continues in this direction, while we continue our drift into socialism, Russia may indeed one day outproduce us.
Ira Levin died just over three years ago, on November 12, 2007, at the age of 78, the largely unsung author of one of the top half-dozen libertarian novels ever published in our language. <i>This Perfect Day</i> has been out of print in recent years, so largely unsung is it.
Under free trade, and without politically oriented government-monopoly militaries, no country would be able to harm another. But with the existence of politicians "leading the country," it's a different story.
Benjamin Franklin once remarked that the only certain things in life are death and taxes. Modern entitlement programs have created a situation in which efforts to avoid death will make tax burdens unbearable.
Before the financial crisis, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain had been able to finance their deficits at artificially low interest rates. They all assumed that their governments would be bailed out by other countries of the eurozone in order to preserve the holy European Union.
The connotation of unreality that the word has acquired follows from the fact that every utopia ignores the central operating lever of man: he seeks to satisfy his desires with the least expenditure of effort.
When he was in his 20s, having newly discovered libertarian ideas, having read Rand, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, and others, having met Rothbard and conversed with him at length, Nozick was fired up with excitement.
The national furor over the TSA's new procedures has elicited the typical response from the bureaucracy and its apologists. These invasive scans and "enhanced pat-downs" are for your own good. You don't want another attack, do you?
