The archives of what we are calling the Old Freeman are now complete, more than 100 issues of this extremely rare periodical.
Today we are putting up a publication hardly anyone even knows about. It was called Faith and Freedom, from the early 1950s. Talk about the memory hole!
And yet it was a haven for many outstanding libertarian writers, among whom F.A. Harper and “Aubrey Herbert,” which was the pen name of Murray Rothbard in those days. In this issue, he writes:
A sign of our time is the split-personality of the conservatives. Many to the right of center are off on a schizophrenic pursuit of both liberty and collectivism.
In domestic affairs this regrettable condition is gradually being recognized for what it is. But the time is high for conservative foreign policy, as well, to be psychoanalyzed in hope of a cure!
Conservatives call for free trade and free enterprise, yet also clamor for absolute embargoes
on trade with Communist nations. Have they forgotten that both parties to free exchange benefit from trade? For our government or any others to prohibit trade is a vicious example of socialistic policy; it injures the Communist countries to be sure; it also injures us.Another example: Conservatives are calling for lower taxes and less government control, while on the other hand they are calling for a virtual holy war against Russia and China, with all the costliness, death and statism that such a war would necessarily entail. Such a holy war would be immoral, inexpedient and ill-conceived at best; in this day of weapons for mass murder, such a call is near insanity.
Yet while conservatives once preferred peace and “isolationism,” in our day they appeal in vague terms for liberation of foreign nations and hint that “We’ve been at war with communism for years, so let’s get it over with.” They bitterly denounce European “allies” for being neutralistic and therefore “unreliable,” while they praise Chiang, Rhee and Franco for being anti-Communist and therefore “reliable friends of the United States.” They denounce our having entered the Korean War; yet denounce the Korean Truce and. call for programs to carry war ever upward and onward.
The notion-very widespread-that we should not have entered the Korean War, but once in it should have launched a total war against China, flouts rules of logic. The best preventive of war is to refrain from warring period. If we had agreed to a cease-fire when the Commies suggested it, or had pulled out of Korea altogether (even better), we would have saved thousands of American and Korean lives.
