War and Foreign Policy: Recent Episodes
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War and Foreign Policy includes current and historical works, dealing with either war and/or foreign policy. Both American and non-American works are included.
In a more reasonable world, people like Cheney, Rice, Bolton, et al., would all be forgotten, shamed, and disgraced for overseeing multiple disastrous wars abroad and the creation of a police state at home. Unfortunately, we don't live in a more reasonable world.
Original Article: "America Since 9/11: 22 Years of Lies and Despotism"
The real effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima were hidden from Americans until the New Yorker published an exposé in 1946. Americans finally were confronted with the truth—even if they didn't want to believe it.
Original Article: "The Bombing of Hiroshima: The Crime and the Cover-Up"
For the past fifty years, the US has not had a military draft. Unfortunately, the end of conscription did not mean US military interventions abroad ended.
Original Article: "How Conscription Ended Fifty Years Ago"
Ryan and Zachary rank the GOP candidates at the debate. They range from "least terrible" (Ramaswamy) to "utterly awful" (Haley and Pence).
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
The Ukraine war brings death and destruction with no end in sight. Instead of encouraging more fighting, Western political leaders need to face reality and find a way to end this conflict.
Original Article: "The Killing and Destruction Must Stop: It Is Time to End the Ukraine War"
The recent actions of the Federal Reserve are reminiscent of central bank activities in wartime.
Original Article: "Has World War III Already Begun?"
In 1944, F.A. Hayek's best-selling book, The Road to Serfdom, warned the West that the "free" nations would lose their freedom as government expanded. He was right.
Original Article: "They Didn't Listen: The Reality of Hayek’s Bestseller"
The East German secret police, the Stasi, developed the art of mass surveillance using pre-digital methods. Modern tech now makes the job a lot easier.
Original Article: "How East Germany's Stasi Perfected Mass Surveillance"
Recorded at the 2003 Supporters Summit: Prosperty, War, and Depression. Ralph Raico discusses how from Jefferson to Madison, and on to Bastiat, Molinari, and Spencer, the "classical" liberals routinely denounced war as the enemy of freedom, prudence, and natural rights. Instead, militarism and imperialism have long been the domain of the enemies of private property and other apologists for the state.
(32:19)
Like many colonial ventures, Belgium's involvement in the Congo had some successes—and many failures.
Original Article: "Belgian Colonialism of the Congo: Facts and Fiction"
Michael and guest co-host Ben Ahdoot talk with Ron Unz about RFK, Jr., Ron's American Prava series, the Unz Review, the Great Reset, censorship, the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and more.
Postwar Germany was occupied, in ruins, with an economy in chaos. Germans were reduced to using cigarettes supplied by American GIs as money.
Original Article: "To Smoke or Not to Smoke: The Cigarette Economy in Postwar Germany, 1945–48"
Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost look at the many factors behind Ukraine's failure to defeat Russia or move closer to NATO membership. Ukraine is sadly caught between a cynical NATO and a Russia that is in it for the long haul.
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
Michael and Walter Block discuss the Ukrainian conflict, reparations, immigration, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
It's fitting that the G7 recently met in Hiroshima because the policies they are following are blowing up the world economy.
Original Article: "The G7 in Hiroshima: The Latest Attempt to Impose a Unipolar World"
Ryan and Tho take a look at the legacy of Daniel Ellsberg's heroic leak of the Pentagon Papers and the evils of government secrecy. Modern leakers like Snowden, Manning, and Assange do important work educating voters and making the state more accountable.
New Radio Rothbard mugs are now available at the Mises Store. Get yours at Mises.org/RothMug
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As geopolitical tensions rise, the Chinese political leadership tells the US government to desist pushing its "color revolutions."
Original Article: "China Calls Out the USA for Instigating the Infamous Color Revolutions"
Just in case you wrongly thought sanctions had anything to do with national security: Biden wants to sanction the people of a small African country over anti-LGBT laws.
Original Article: "Biden Wants Sanctions for Uganda Because Its Government Passed Anti-LGBT Laws"
Ryan and Zack look at how China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are reshaping the Middle East into a region where the United States no longer dominates. This is a good thing for ordinary Americans.
Additional Resources "Thanks to Sanctions, the US Is Losing Its Grip on the Middle East" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/WES_11_A
"The Petrodollar-Saudi Axis Is Why Washington Hates Iran" by Gary Richied: Mises.org/WES_11_B
"Peace is Breaking Out in the Middle East… and Washington is Not Happy!" by Ron Paul: Mises.org/WES_11_C
"Why the End of the Petrodollar Spells Trouble for the US Regime" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/WES_11_D
"Washington Miffed as China Makes Peace" by Joseph Solis-Mullen: Mises.org/WES_11_E
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
While the US ratchets up efforts to isolate its many enemies, the Chinese, the Saudis, the Arab League, and OPEC all shrug and look to increasing international communication and trade.
Original Article: "Thanks to Sanctions, the US Is Losing Its Grip on the Middle East"
Noam Chomsky's latest offering—a series of interviews—presents the best (and worst) of one of America's premier public intellectuals.
Original Article: "There's No Place like Noam"
In 1948, Ludwig Erhardt rescued a German economy that was in shambles simply by invoking free markets and currency reform. Our economy needs its Rothbard moment.
Original Article: "Rothbard’s Button Doesn’t Exist, but It Needs to Be Invented"
Another mass shooting, another call for gun control. However, when it comes to mass killings, Washington sets the sorry example.
Original Article: "Washington Has No Moral Authority to Ban Guns"
As the US government debases the dollar, other nations take notice and possibilities increase that another currency based on sound principles might emerge.
Original Article: "Will a New BRICS Currency Change Anything? Maybe"
The dollar became the dominant global currency not so much because of its own merits, but because of the self-destruction of the pound sterling caused by the British state and central bank.
Original Article: "How the Dollar Became the World's Top Global Currency"
We hear ad nauseum from political and media elites that the war in Ukraine is about preserving "our freedoms." Murray Rothbard had something to say about this sophistry.
Original Article: "Rothbard Was Right: Wars Don't Enhance Freedom. They Destroy Liberty."
The fight between Russia and NATO is not about "democracy versus authoritarianism." Rather both the US and Russian states are doubling down because they are doing what states do: seeking power.
Original Article: "The Ukraine War Isn't about Democracy. It's about States Seeking More Power."
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Waco Massacre in which the media and the government self-congratulated each other in absolving the FBI of any crimes. Nothing has changed since then.
Original Article: "Waco 30 Years Later: It Is Not an Atrocity if the Feds Do It"
Ryan and Zack talk about some of the details from the recently leaked Pentagon documents. They reveal dysfunctional American foreign policy and just how much contempt the US regime has for its own allies.
Additional Resources"What the leaked Pentagon documents reveal — 8 key takeaways" by Paul Adams, Jean Mackenzie, and Antoinette Radford (BBC News): Mises.org/WES_10_A
"Fact Sheet on U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine" (U.S. Department of Defense, 19 April 2023): Mises.org/WES_10_B
"U.S. doubts Ukraine counteroffensive will yield big gains, leaked document says" by Alex Horton, John Hudson, Isabelle Khurshudyan, and Samuel Oakford (Washington Post): Mises.org/WES_10_C
"Arbitrary Use of Power: Punishing Those Who Expose Not-So-Secret Government Secrets" by Bill Anderson: Mises.org/WES_10_D
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
Donald Trump legally pays hush money and prosecutors try to fashion a crime from it. However, if a president lies and thousands of people die, it is called foreign policy.
Original Article: "Presidents Are Legally Immune for Their Most Dangerous Crimes"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
American politicians are beating war drums. They forget that bad relations are costly in many ways.
Original Article: "It Hurts to Pay for Strained China-USA Relations"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Low rates of military reenlistment in the USA are spun as a near crisis. Perhaps this situation should make us more optimistic about our future.
Original Article: "Low Rates of Military Enlistment May Portend Prosperity Ahead"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Sen. Lindsey Graham recently called for US military intervention in Mexico to fight the drug cartels. Someone needs to remind him that Mexico is a sovereign country.
Original Article: "Invading Mexico in the Name of the Drug War Is a Really Bad Idea"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The bipartisan RESTRICT Act—marketed as a "Tik Tok ban"—is properly named because it will restrict freedom, empower the state, and expand government surveillance.
Original Article: "The RESTRICT Act Launches a New War on Free Speech"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Ryan and Zachary talk about how wars are not nearly as cheap or economically harmless as many Americans seem to think. Rather, taxpayers must give up enormous amounts of resources to fund wars halfway across the globe that have little to do with actual defense. Americans are still paying interest on the trillions spent on Washington's many lost wars of recent decades.
Additional Resources"On Paying for the Costs of War and War Loans" by Ludwig von Mises (1918): Mises.org/WES_09_A
"The Cross of Iron" by Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953): Mises.org/WES_09_B
"Fact Sheet on U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine" (U.S. Department of Defense, 4 April 2023): Mises.org/WES_09_C
"How the Fed Is Enabling Congress's Trillion-Dollar Deficits" by Ryan McMaken (2021): Mises.org/WES_09_D
"War and the Money Machine: Concealing the Costs of War beneath the Veil of Inflation" by Joseph T. Salerno (2021): Mises.org/WES_09_E
"As the Pentagon Fails Another Audit, Congress Wants to Spend Even More on 'Defense'" by Ryan McMaken (2022): Mises.org/WES_09_F
"Russia and Ukraine named as Europe’s most corrupt countries" by William Nattrass (3 February 2023): Mises.org/WES_09_G
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
Many governments support continuing the Ukraine war, but ordinary people in Europe, America, and the developing world fear the war will bring economic disaster.
Original Article: "Why Most of the World Isn't on Board with the NATO-Russia War"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Advocates for more military spending tell us the taxpayer must pay to expand the US's nuclear arsenal. Because of China. In truth, the US's arsenal is in no danger of not "keeping up."
Original Article: "No, We Don't Need More Nuclear Weapons"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Ryan and Tho talk about how last week's banking panic led to new ways for bankers and politicians to exploit regular people through inflation, regulations, and corrupt loans.
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Resources are scarce even when money is not.
Original Article: "A Permanent Wartime Economy"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Progressives view all aspects of human life as a struggle against forces of oppression. Earlier this week on BBC, Professor Mariana Mazzucato suggested governments across the West should simply print money not only to help Ukraine, but also to finance other "wars" against climate change, inequality, and more. Should national treasuries essentially adopt a permanent wartime footing and print far more money, as Mazzucato and Warren Mosler recommend? Hint: Jeff and Bob say "No."
Jeff's article "A Permanent Wartime Economy": Mises.org/HAP386a
Bob's debate with Warren Mosler: Mises.org/HAP386b
Bob's article in The American Conservative on the Greenbacker movement: Mises.org/386c
Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at how the regime's narrative on foreign policy is failing, and how some in Congress are finally standing up to the warfare state. Yet, the regime wants more US wars in Syria, Ukraine, and now even Mexico. And you will pay for it all. Will the voters demand a more sane foreign policy in 2024?
Recommended Reading"The Costs of War in Syria" by Ryan McMaken (2013): Mises.org/RR_124_A
"A Permanent Wartime Economy" by Jeff Deist: Mises.org/RR_124_B
The War, Economy, and State Podcast with Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost: Mises.org/WES
"Mission Accomplished: Seymour Hersh, Nordstream, and What’s Left on the Cutting Room Floor" by Tom Luongo (LewRockwell.com): Mises.org/RR_124_C
"Meanwhile in Yemen, the US Government Supplies Weapons to Continue the Carnage" by Trenton Hale: Mises.org/RR_124_D
"House Votes Down Resolution to Withdraw Troops from Syria" by Dave DeCamp (AntiWar.com): Mises.org/RR_124_E
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
As the Biden administration continues to inflate the dollar, other nations are questioning the existence of the petrodollar.
Original Article: "Saudi Arabia’s Quandary: The End of the Petrodollar"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
American and European political elites seem to be wanting the Russia-Ukraine war to be fought to the last Ukranian and have done nothing to bring peace. It's time for a change.
Original Article: "Just Say No to the New Forever War"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Western intellectuals and their political allies are pushing relentlessly toward a unipolar world. Freedom lies in the multipolar direction.
Original Article: "Why Libertarians Should Support the Multipolar World"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
By itself, the end of the petrodollar won't destroy the dollar. But it will continue a trend that weakens both the dollar and the US regime's power.
Original Article: "Why the End of the Petrodollar Spells Trouble for the US Regime"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost talk about the recent freak-out over the Chinese balloon, American foreign-policy moralism, and what sort of "threat" a balloon really represents. Also discussed is nuclear deterrence, American domestic spying, and why most states—including allies—spy on each other.
Additional Resources"So Much Hot Air: The (Fake) China Threat Strikes Again!" by Joseph Solis-Mullen: Mises.org/WES_08_A
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
The constitution has not protected our natural rights, nor did it prevent the US from becoming a blood-soaked failed state a mere 73 years after the constitution was ratified.
Original Article: "The Constitution Failed. It Secured Neither Peace nor Freedom."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Americans often have defended the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as regrettable but necessary for ending World War II. The actual record tells us a much different story.
Original Article: "Questioning the Military Necessity of Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japanese Cities"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost discuss new estimates of just how costly a US-China war over Taiwan would be. Things are made even worse by the fact the US is already shopping most of its weapon stockpiles to Ukraine. The US government simply refuses to acknowledge that scarcity exists.
Additional Resources"The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan" by Mark F. Cancian, Matthew Cancian, and Eric Heginbotham: Mises.org/WES_07_A
"Taiwan Is Not Ukraine" by Zachary Yost: Mises.org/WES_07_B
"Victory Without Battle: A Smarter Vision for US-Taiwan Policy" by Zachary Yost: Mises.org/WES_07_C
"Rebuilding U.S. Inventories: Six Critical Systems" by Mark F. Cancian: Mises.org/WES_07_D
"Taiwan has nearly US$19 billion in arms sales backlogged in US" by Eric Chang: Mises.org/WES_07_E
"Costs of War" (The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs): Mises.org/WES_07_F
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
We know that "bring the troops home" is too much for America's foreign policy establishment. But if they can't handle that, a good first step would be to at least "bring the troops home" to the western hemisphere and the Americas. A new Monroe doctrine would be a less bad foreign policy paradigm than what we have now.
Additional Resources"Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy" by Murray N. Rothbard: Mises.org/WES_06_A
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look ahead to 2023 with a handful of predictions for the new year. They even manage to find one reason for optimism!
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look back at 2022 and touch on some of the worst and underappreciated trends of the year. For those interested in a more holiday-themed episode, check out last year's debate on the virtues of Ebenezer Scrooge (Mises.org/RR_45).
Looking for Christmas gifts? Use promo code ROTHPOD for a 20% discount on select books featured on Radio Rothbard. Or, use code MURRAYCHRISTMAS for a special 10% discount on select new Mises apparel: Mises.org/RR_113_Store
Recommended Reading"Why Are So Many Men Leaving the Workforce?" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_113_A
"The Jobs "Boom" Isn't So Hot When We Remember Nearly Six Million Men Are Missing from the Workforce" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_113_B
"The Pandemic Is 'Over,' but the Feds Aren't Giving Up Their Emergency Powers" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_113_C
"Ebenezer Scrooge: Hero or Villain?" (Radio Rothbard): Mises.org/RR_113_D
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Economist Christopher Coyne of George Mason University uses economic logic to expose the follies of militaristic US policies overseas.
Original Article: "An Economist Examines US Foreign Policy and Finds It Wanting"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Tho Bishop and Ryan McMaken discuss the recent report that the Pentagon has failed its fifth straight audit and why no one seems to care. Why has the public lost interest in basic fiscal sanity? How recent is this problem? What might force Americans to care?
Looking for Christmas gifts? Use promo code ROTHPOD for a 20% discount on select books featured on Radio Rothbard. Or, use code MURRAYCHRISTMAS for a special 10% discount on select new Mises apparel: Mises.org/RR_111_Store
Recommended Reading"As the Pentagon Fails Another Audit, Congress Wants to Spend Even More on 'Defense'" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_111_A
"Can a Deeply Unserious America Fix Its Economy?" by Jeff Deist: Mises.org/RR_111_B
"Biden's Defense Plan: Limitless Global Meddling" (War, Economy, and State podcast): Mises.org/RR_111_C
America: From Republic to Empire (video series): Mises.org/RR_111_D
The Betrayal of the American Right by Murray N. Rothbard: Mises.org/RR_111_E
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
On this episode of War, Economy, and State, Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost take a look at the Biden Administration's new National Security Strategy. The Biden plan is to intervene everywhere and always across the entire globe. In fact, the plan absurdly says "nothing is beyond" the US's capacity to remake the global order.
Additional Resources"National Security Strategy, October 2022" (PDF): Mises.org/WES_05_A
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
Supporters of US microchip policy against China claim the policy is "strategic," but in reality, it is old-fashioned protectionism with all the usual economic damage.
Original Article: "The US Chip Blockade against China Is Creating Unplanned Consequences"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
On this episode of War, Economy, and State, Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost check in on the Russo-Ukrainian war to examine Russia's strength, the US's blank check, and the prospects of World War III.
Additional Resources "NATO: Our International Welfare Queens" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/WES_04_A
"A Brief History of Pundits Encouraging Nuclear War" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/WES_04_B
"The NATO Treaty Does Not Give Congress a Bye on World War III" by Michael J. Glennon: Mises.org/WES_04_C
"U.S. Mutual Security Treaties: The Commitment Myth" by Michael J. Glennon: Mises.org/WES_04_D
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
Historians praise the US entry into World War I because it enabled an Allied victory. But it also led to the economic disasters of the 1920s and ’30s.
Original Article: "World War I: The Great War Was also the Great Enabler of Progressive Governance"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The dollar's petrodollar status has led the Federal Reserve to irresponsibly inflate the currency. The rest of the world has noticed and is looking for alternatives.
Original Article: "World Dollar Hegemony Is Ending (and That May Be a Good Thing)"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
Modern warfare is a product of the state, which engages in violence at home and abroad. Peace is possible, but only when the state loses power.
Original Article: "Clausewitz, the UN Charter, and a Libertarian View on War"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
The Ponzi game known as selling US government debt is nearing its end. The seller is running out of suckers.
Original Article: "The Petrodollar-Saudi Axis Is Why Washington Hates Iran"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
War dissenters are branded "Putinists" by the foreign policy elites who casually flirt with nuclear war. But preferring negotiations to World War III hardly makes one a Putin sympathizer.
Original Article: "It's Time to Abandon America's Fetish for "Unconditional Surrender""
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
The US dollar is not the world's "reserve" currency because of responsibility on behalf of the monetary authorities. Instead, the dollar's "strength" wages from the USA's self-appointed role as the world's protector.
Original Article: "It's All about the Benjamins: Why the Dollar Determines US Policies"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
Until the day comes that a majority of the population wants to abolish all states, it makes sense in the meantime to look to ways that will reduce the power of states, localize that power, and take at least some of it out of the hands of some of the most powerful ruling state elites. This episode of Radio Rothbard features Ryan McMaken's talk presented at the Mises Institute 40th Anniversary Supporters Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 7, 2022.
Recommended Reading "On Secession and Small States" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_102_A
"What We Mean by Decentralization" by Lew Rockwell: Mises.org/RR_102_B
"The European Miracle" by Ralph Raico: Mises.org/RR_102_C
"Nations by Consent" by Murray N. Rothbard: Mises.org/RR_102_D
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
In wartime, politicians frequently attempt to claim that all the citizens of foreign states are guilty of all the crimes their regimes commit. This is a modern invention, and a barbaric one.
Original Article: "No, Ordinary Russians Are Not Responsible for the Crimes of the Russian Regime"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
Is there a case for an American empire? Professor Nigel Biggar of Oxford University believes so, but David Gordon sets him straight.
Original Article: "Biggar Thy Neighbor"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute joins Jeff and Bob to discuss the economic and political ramifications of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline sabotage.
Read "The Economics of War" from Human Action: Mises.org/HAP363-1 Read a study Bob co-authored on Europe's energy crisis: Mises.org/HAP363-2
Ryan and Tho talk with Mises.org author and German native Rosanna Weber about the energy crisis in Germany. German policymakers have greatly worsened the ongoing energy crisis in Germany by abandoning nuclear energy and taking a hard line on Russian natural gas. Now with the damage done to the Nord Stream pipeline, German consumers face even fewer options as winter approaches.
Rosanna Weber is a graduate student in Economic History at the London School of Economics and a freelance journalist.
Recommended Reading "Germany's Nuclear Choice: Russian Energy Crisis Forces a Reckoning" by Rosanna Weber: Mises.org/RR_101_A
"Eat or Heat: Europeans Already Are Facing Previously Unthinkable Dilemmas" by Claudio Grass: Mises.org/RR_101_B
"Europe Ditched Russian Energy. Now People Are Sitting in Line For Days to Buy Coal. Is Biden to Blame?" by Alice Salles: Mises.org/RR_101_C
"Germany's (and Europe's) Self-Inflicted Upcoming Energy Crunch" by Weimin Chen: Mises.org/RR_101_D
"The 'Stunning Success' of the Green Revolution Is Yet Another Progressive Myth" by Kristoffer Mousten Hansen: Mises.org/RR_101_E
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Winter is approaching and Europeans are facing homes without heat, thanks to the US-led sanctions against Russia. Who will carry the blame when people freeze to death?
Original Article: "Europe Ditched Russian Energy. Now People Are Sitting in Line for Days to Buy Coal. Is Biden to Blame?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
At the urging of the United States, Germany and other European governments have levied sanctions against Russia. In reality, these governments have levied sanctions against themselves and their citizens.
Original Article: "Germany's (and Europe's) Self-Inflicted Upcoming Energy Crunch"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The foreign policy establishments in the West, the United States in particular, have pursued an aggressive policy that has led to war. The sad result is moral theater in the West and death in Ukraine.
Original Article: "Review: How the West Brought War to Ukraine"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
When the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe, people there looked to the West—and especially the USA—in hopes of freedom. Today, it is the West promoting culture wars and collectivism.
Original Article: "Trapped by Imperialist Leviathans: The Case for Freedom in Central and Eastern Europe"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
If falling enlistments are an indication of declining faith in the military overall—and especially declining support among conservatives—that's very good news.
Original Article: "Falling Military Recruitment Is Another Sign of Waning Faith in the Regime"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Not long ago, Germany's politicians were proudly phasing out nuclear power. Facing a harsh winter without Russian natural gas, the atom suddenly seems like a good alternative.
Original Article: "Germany's Nuclear Choice: Russian Energy Crisis Forces a Reckoning"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Fernando R. Tesón is all mixed up. He thinks libertarians' principled nonaggression ties their hands in the face of violence against others and that this limitation extends to good-guy states.
Original Article: "Should Libertarians Get behind States Waging "Humanitarian" Wars?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Typical discussions about the fate of our planet center around issues like war, climate change, and sovereignty. Peter Zelhan says "the halcyon days of 1980–2015 are over."
Original Article: "Can We See the End of the World from Here? Will We Still Feel Fine?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
While most people tend to see the Ukraine-Russia war as a current phenomenon, it is the continuation of what happened in Europe more than a century ago.
Original Article: "Who Is Most Responsible for the Ongoing War in Ukraine?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Germany's foray into green energy is turning out to be a disaster, but abandoning the green utopia is only the first stage for that country. It is time to put common sense and sound economics at the forefront of German policy making.
Original Article: "Germany Can Save Itself, and Possibly the World, by Abandoning Four Failed Policies"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
National divorce does happen, and debts are not necessarily repudiated as a result. We can look to examples from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Czech-Slovak split.
Original Article: "After Secession, What Happens to the National Debt?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Populists on the right (and left) are claiming that American prosperity came about because of high protective tariffs. But political rhetoric can't replace sound economics.
Original Article: "Do Tariffs Create Prosperity? Challenging the Populist Right on Trade"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost discuss some of the strategic problems and historical oddities surrounding the relationships between the US, China, and Taiwan.
Additional Resources "Can China Conquer Taiwan?" Radio Rothbard with Ryan McMaken, Zachary Yost, and Tho Bishop: Mises.org/WES_03_A
"The World at War" by Ralph Raico (Video): Mises.org/WES_03_B
"Victory Without Battle: A Smarter Vision for US-Taiwan Policy " by Zachary Yost (PDF): Mises.org/WES_03_C
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
Robert Kagan is one of the most vigorous supporters of an “ideological” American foreign policy. America, in his view, should extend the blessings of liberal democracy worldwide, and in doing so, we necessarily act as a hegemonic power in the present circumstances—not, he hastens to add, so that we can for selfish motives dominate the world but rather to ensure the spread and maintenance of a liberal world order. In his notable book Dangerous Nation, Kagan argues that the ideological view he supports does not break radically with a supposed isolationist past: America, as he sees matters, has from its inception acted to expand its power.
You would scarcely expect someone with these views to argue that the America First Committee and other noninterventionists, who wanted the United States to stay out of World War II, had a plausible case for their position, but this is indeed what Kagan does in his excellent article “War and the American Hegemony,” published online in Liberties. In it, Kagan presents the noninterventionists’ argument in as persuasive a way as I have ever read.
To be sure, his doing so does not signal a change in his position—far from it. To the contrary, his argument is this: almost everybody now regards World War II as “necessary”; given the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on America, we had no choice but to get involved. Foreign policy “hawks” think that other wars are also necessary and should thus be supported, while “doves” deny this. Doves hold that almost all wars except World War II are “wars of choice,” not necessity, and hence best avoided. Kagan endeavors to undercut the latter contention by in effect saying to contemporary defenders of caution “You admit that it was right to get involved in World War II, but it wasn’t, as you say, as war of necessity. It was an ideological war of choice, and a successful one too. You should acknowledge that the distinction between wars of choice and wars of necessity is untenable and support American global hegemony.”
Kagan says that the anti-interventionists argued in this way:
Those many Americans who opposed American involvement in Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s certainly did not believe the war was necessary. This was not because they were ignorant of the potential risks posed by Hitler and the Japanese Empire. The America First Committee … launched itself in September 1940, three months after the unexpected conquest of France by the German blitzkrieg. Its founders understood the implications of France’s defeat. They not only believed but predicted that Britain would be the next to fall, leaving the United States without a single meaningful ally in the European theater.
This was hardly a desirable situation; why, then, did the America First Committee in the face of it advocate staying out of war?
The anti-interventionists’ main practical argument was that even in those direst of international circumstances, American security was not immediately or even prospectively threatened. By virtue of its wealth, its strength, and, above all, its geography, the United States was effectively invulnerable to foreign attack. Those who held this view were not benighted cranks, nor even the well-respected men and women who led the America First movement. It was conventional wisdom among the nation’s leading foreign policy and military experts in the late 1930s.
You might object that this point doesn’t overthrow the claim that World War II was a necessary war. After all, the Japanese attacked the United States, and Germany supported its Axis ally by declaring war. Kagan responds that neither Japan nor Germany sought war with the United States and that there would have been no war had America allowed these powers to proceed with their expansionist plans.
In retrospect it is clear that the Japanese would have preferred not to go to war with the United States, certainly not in 1941 but perhaps ever. Japanese military leaders did not even believe they could win a war with the United States absent divine intervention or a failure of American will. As the anti-interventionists pointed out, the Japanese would not have attacked Pearl Harbor had the Roosevelt administration not attempted to use its economic and diplomatic influence to try to block or slow Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland (and had Roosevelt not decided to place the U.S. Pacific Fleet there as a supposed deterrent).
And if Japan had not attacked when it did, Hitler would not have declared war on the United States when he did. In 1941 Hitler was actually trying to avoid pulling the Americans fully into the Atlantic war, despite Roosevelt’s deliberately provocative and aggressive expansion of the U.S. Navy’s role.
Why, then, did the United States embark on a policy of confrontation with Germany and Japan? Kagan argues that it was for ideological reasons. President Roosevelt and other “liberals” did not want to live with fascism dominant in Europe and Asia, but wanted instead to help secure a liberal world order.
In his State of the Union address in January 1939—months before Germany’s invasion of Poland—Roosevelt barely talked about national security per se. He talked about belief and principle. “There comes a time in the affairs of men,” he told Americans, “when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. The defense of religion, of democracy and of good faith among nations is all the same fight. To save one we must now make up our minds to save all” … Roosevelt and other Americans believed that preserving American democracy—the ultimate American “interest”—required a global balance of power that favored liberalism.
Opponents of intervention responded that it was imperialistic to endeavor to remodel the world in America’s image. “To do so was more than a mistake, the anti-interventionists believed. It was immoral and contrary to American traditions and principles. Americans’ refusal to accept the world ‘as it is’ amounted to a form of imperialism.”
Kagan agrees that the interventionists were imperialistic but maintains that a form of imperialism based on American values was the proper policy aim then and remains so today. In assessing Kagan’s case, two points ought to be borne in mind. First, though the Nazi regime of the 1930s was evil, the exigencies of world war worsened it extraordinarily. Second, in Kagan’s account of the war as a struggle between liberty and tyranny, there is no mention of Soviet Russia. Roosevelt and like-minded “liberals” turned a blind eye to the many massacres perpetrated under Joseph Stalin. Whether the best way to promote America’s values was to aid and abet Soviet power in Europe and Asia is a question Kagan doesn’t address.
On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Tho Bishop is joined by Mises Research Fellow Marcel Gautreau for a wide-ranging conversation about challenges to the American-dominated neoliberal order. Marcel is a Ph.D. candidate studying economic and other policy reforms in non-liberal states and offers his perspective on how Rothbardian power-elite analysis is a powerful tool in understanding the world's most pressing issues today. He also shares his favorite Mises U lecture.
Additional Resources "Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature" by Murray Rothbard: Mises.org/RR_91_A
For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto by Murray Rothbard: Mises.org/RR_91_B
Never a Dull Moment: A Libertarian Look at the Sixties by Murray Rothbard: Mises.org/RR_91_C
"A Rothbardian Analysis of the Constitutional Convention" by Patrick Newman: Mises.org/RR_91_Video
Marcel Gautreau on Twitter: @anarchyinblack
Watch Mises University 2022 live: Mises.org/Live
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
In the 1950s, McCarthyism targeted people who were accused of supporting Russia. Today's McCarthyism targets people accused of supporting … Russia. Some things never change.
Original Article: "Like the Old McCarthyism, the New McCarthyism Targets Russia"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The West Indies played a vital role in growing the British economy in the eighteenth century.
Original Article: "The Industrial Revolution and the West Indies: Did the Colonies Spark Progress in the Metropole?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In an attempt to stymie the spread of covid-19, the Chinese government has imposed reckless and harmful lockdown policies in several cities. This will not end well.
Original Article: "China's Draconian Lockdown Policies: Major Consequences to Follow"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Lots of Americans now openly discuss the idea of National Divorce, focusing on the political, cultural, and social divisions in America. But what about the economics? How would issues like debt, entitlements, and defense be addressed if the US split into two or more new political entities?
Mises.org senior editor and economist Ryan McMaken joins Jeff to discuss.
Listen to Hoppe on centralization and secession: Mises.org/HAP352-1
More than sixty years after being "liberated" by Fidel Castro and communism, Cuba has become a large slave state where people enjoy little freedom.
Original Article: "More than Sixty Years after "Liberation," Cuba Is a Communist Slave State"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The standard line among the Great Reset crowd is that capitalism exploits poor nations and causes poverty. In reality, capitalism and free markets have reduced poverty around the world.
Original Article: "Developing Countries Don't Need Wealth Transfers; They Need Free Markets"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
While the economic sanctions against Russia are helping to impoverish people in that country, they are doing a lot of damage elsewhere too.
Original Article: "The Unending Farce of US Sanctions against Russia"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
When conservatives applaud unlimited war spending, they not only harm our economy and body politic, but they give the Left a powerful talking point.
Original Article: "War Spending Gives MMTers and the Left a Strong Talking Point"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
US foreign policy is a morass of lobbying, payouts, decisions, and power plays that violates the standards this country claims to promote.
Original Article: "Who Really Makes US Foreign Policy? Who Benefits and Who Loses?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The Mauritius government still denies Chagossians independence, continuing colonial policies.
Original Article: "Independence for Chagossians? Time to End Colonialist Policies"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In the wake of mass shootings, progressives claim that draconian gun laws will stop these tragic events. However, the gun control record in places like Jamaica provides contrary evidence.
Original Article: "Jamaica's Experience Shows That Even Draconian Gun Control Will Not Stop Gun Violence"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Inflation in Argentina is far worse than neighboring countries. It has only one cause: an extractive and confiscatory monetary policy—printing pesos without control and without demand.
Original Article: "How Money Printing Destroyed Argentina and Can Destroy Others"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Conventional wisdom says a country should manage its debts, but what if debt has become uncontrollable?
Original Article: "In Defense of Defaulting on the National Debt"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
African economies aren't being strangled by capitalism but by statism, which has imposed inflation, debt, and high taxes.
Original Article: "A Triple-Barreled Gun Is Destroying African Economies: Inflation, Government Debt, and Taxes"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost examine some reasons why early Americans hated the idea of a professional standing army, and some of the tactics used to decentralize military power in the US and Switzerland.
Recommended Reading "Why We Can't Ignore the Militia Clause of the Second Amendment" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/WES_02_A
"The Second Amendment's Authors Would Hate Today's Huge Federal Military" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/WES_02_B
"Opposing Standing Armies: A Great American Tradition" by Zachary Yost: Mises.org/WES_02_C
"When State Governors Tried To Take Back Control of the National Guard" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/WES_02_D
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
The so-called Great Reset is an attempt by wealthy elites and their allies to control people's lives. Their schemes need to be both exposed and resisted.
Original Article: "The Great Reset: Turning Back the Clock on Civilization"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Totalitarian societies do not become that way overnight. There are recognizable signs and stages which show how a society slides into that abyss.
Original Article: "The Five Stages of Totalitarianism"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Tho Bishop introduces a new Mises Institute podcast: War, Economy, and State, with Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost. The War, Economy, and State podcast covers geopolitics and international relations from a free-market and anti-interventionist perspective. You can subscribe at Mises.org/WES.
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
The Davos crowd sold globalization as a way to bring nations together. Unfortunately, by insisting on political conformity, the globalists have set the world on fire.
Original Article: "Instead of Uniting the World, Globalization Has Set Nation against Nation"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In seeking membership in NATO, Finland and Sweden seem to believe they will have more military security. But they also are giving up their precious independence.
Original Article: "Finland and Sweden in NATO: Disregarding the Benefits of Neutrality"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Vladimir Putin (not unlike President George W. Bush) has led his country into a destructive war, yet the Russian political leadership enjoys wide public support.
Original Article: "Why Russia's Authoritarian Regime Continues to Enjoy Public Support"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Once upon a time, the progressive hero was "socialist man." Today, we have "Davos man," who is ready to plan your life for you—your wishes notwithstanding.
Original Article: "Davos Man Is at It Again: The 2022 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
American politicians claim that excessive military spending makes Americans "safe." The record shows otherwise.
Original Article: "Peace through Strength? Excessive US Military Spending Encourages More War"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Krugman’s recent NYT column on Russia features commentary on trade surpluses that is at best very misleading.
Original Article: "What Krugman Gets Right and Wrong on Trade Surpluses"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The presence of American companies in foreign nations was once seen as a sign of American superiority and an instrument of American cultural power. Not anymore.
Original Article: "McDonald's Closes All Stores in Russia as Woke Russophobes Rage"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The Europeans are welcome to keep NATO going if they like. But the time has come for the United States to exit.
Original Article: "NATO Plans to Rip Off Americans Even More as Sweden and Finland Set to Join"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Trying to interpret the actions of Vladimir Putin or politics in Russia using Western narratives is likely to end in failure.
Original Article: "Understanding Russia's War: The Strange Philosophy of Aleksandr Dugin"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In the first episode of this new podcast, Ryan McMaken and Zachary Yost discuss NATO, Turkey, Russia, and why the USA needs to leave it all behind.
Be sure to follow War, Economy, and State at Mises.org/WES.
Proponents of arming Ukraine against Russia call critics "isolationists" as a pejorative term. But these "entangling alliances" have a history of sad endings with tragic results.
Original Article: "Noninterventionism Is Not Isolationism: The US Government Should Stop Arming Ukraine"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Since the early 1960s, African nations have gained political independence from colonial powers, but the monetary colonialism of fiat money continues.
Original Article: "Africa's Way Out of Monetary Colonialism"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Colonialism, imperialism, unfair trade, and more. African politicians look everywhere for the causes of Africa's poverty and chaos but in the mirror.
Original Article: "African Politicians Must Stop Blaming Others for Africa's Economic Woes"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Here we are in 2022, worrying about if the world's oldest nuclear powers will be the ones to touch off a global nuclear war. It's not Pakistan or North Korea or "proliferation." It's Washington and Moscow, yet again.
Original Article: "Proliferation Isn't the Problem. Legacy Nuclear Powers Again Threaten the Globe."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop discuss recent inflation news, broader chaos in financial markets, and another round of funding for Ukraine.
Recommended Reading "Inflation Up, Wages Down as Biden Passes the Buck to the Do-Nothing Fed" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_81_A
"From El Salvador to Africa, the Next Currency War Pits Populists against Bankers" by Tho Bishop: Mises.org/RR_81_B
"Biden: Inflation Is Everybody’s Fault but Mine" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_81_C
"Noninterventionism Is Not Isolationism: The US Government Should Stop Arming Ukraine" by Daniel Martin: Mises.org/RR_81_D
"Forget What the 'Experts' Claim about Deflation: It Strengthens the Economy" by Frank Shostak: Mises.org/RR_81_E
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
With members of Congress claiming that the Russian invasion of Ukraine somehow threatens the US homeland, it is time to tell the truth about the military threats to this nation.
Original Article: "Where the Truth Is Hidden: Debating the Current State of the US Armed Forces"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In 1991, Ukrainians held an election and voted for secession. Today we’re supposed to cheer that. But to suggest something similar for a region of the United States? Well, we’re told that’s just plain wrong.
Original Article: "You Support Ukraine's Independence? Then You Support Secession."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Moscow has used naturalization and immigration to effect demographic change and encourage conflict between ethnic groups in neighboring states. It has proven to be an effective foreign policy tool.
Original Article: "How Russia Uses Immigration and Naturalization to Grow State Power"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Washington regards the entire world as its "sphere of influence." But now Beijing is looking to follow the US playbook on hegemony and expand Beijing's network of military bases abroad.
Original Article: "Expect Washington to Throw a Fit over China's New Deal with the Solomon Islands"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Imposing economic sanctions upon Russia is tantamount to throwing gasoline on a raging fire. The sanctions will not end the Russian invasion of Ukraine and only will make things worse.
Original Article: "The Economic Sanctions against Russia Are Destructive and Counterproductive: We Must Oppose Them"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
America's Cold War relationships have created conditions for very hot wars to take place. The current war in Ukraine is part of that sorry Cold War legacy.
Original Article: "There's a Reason George Washington Warned against "Entangling Relationships""
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Trying to understand the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the exclusive viewpoint of modern Western democracy is to ignore the long history of authoritarian leadership in Russia.
Original Article: "Russia's Invasion of Ukraine Is Just the Latest Expression of Pan-Slavic Authoritarianism"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
From globalization to sanctions, to international institutions like the UN, the US is leading a small global fragment that's little more than NATO and a handful of friends. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the global economy isn't signing on.
Original Article: "The "Rules-Based International Order" Is Dead. Washington Killed It."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The sanctions against Russia have the potential to spiral into something much larger. Indeed, many governments are using the current conflict as an opportunity to further push "green energy," rearmament, and other big-spending schemes.
Original Article: "Heavy Sanctions against Russia Could Usher in a Wider Economic War"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
While the battlefield results are mixed, much of the action in the Russia-Ukraine war is happening beyond the warring countries.
Original Article: "After More Than a Month of Fighting, Where Do Things Stand in the Russia-Ukraine War?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Rothbard the historian explained so well how the true progressive goal was always to remake America domestically by promoting war.
Original Article: "Rothbard on Today's Progressive War Jingoism"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The states of Europe have more than enough wealth and military potential to deal with a second-rate power like Russia. The American taxpayers, on the other hand, deserve a break from Europe's grifting.
Original Article: "NATO: Our International Welfare Queens"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Events in Ukraine are happening very fast, and if I tried to predict what will happen there, my prediction would soon be overtaken by events. But one thing is certain. We need to understand the background of the crisis, and we also need to remember the basic principles that should guide American policy.
To understand the background, the best guide is Stephen Cohen, a world-renowned authority on both the Bolsheviks and contemporary Russia. He pointed out in November 2019:
For centuries and still today, Russia and large parts of Ukraine have had much in common—a long territorial border; a shared history; ethnic, linguistic, and other cultural affinities; intimate personal relations; substantial economic trade; and more. Even after the years of escalating conflict between Kiev and Moscow since 2014, many Russians and Ukrainians still think of themselves in familial ways. The United States has almost none of these commonalities with Ukraine.
Which is also to say that Ukraine is not “a vital US national interest,” as most leaders of both parties, Republican and Democrat alike, and much of the US media now declare. On the other hand, Ukraine is a vital Russian interest by any geopolitical or simply human reckoning.
Why, then, is Washington so deeply involved in Ukraine? (The proposed nearly $400 million in US military aid to Kiev would mean, of course, even more intrusive involvement.) And why is Ukraine so deeply involved in Washington, in a different way, that it has become a pretext for attempts to impeach President Donald Trump?
The short but essential answer is Washington’s decision, taken by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, to expand NATO eastward from Germany and eventually to Ukraine itself. Ever since, both Democrats and Republicans have insisted that Ukraine is a “vital US national interest.” Those of us who opposed that folly warned it would lead to dangerous conflicts with Moscow, conceivably even war. Imagine Washington’s reaction, we pointed out, if Russian military bases began to appear on Canada’s or Mexico’s borders with America. We were not wrong: An estimated 13,000 souls have already died in the Ukrainian-Russian war in the Donbass and some 2 million people have been displaced.
The propagandists for brain-dead Biden like to say that Putin had Ukraine surrounded. But in fact, the US and its NATO satellites had Russia surrounded. In the years before the current crisis, we had ample opportunity to reach a compromise settlement. Instead, we kept the option of membership in NATO open to Ukraine and overthrew a Ukrainian president who was pro-Russian.
At the Kremlin last week [in November 2021], Putin drew his red line:
“The threat on our western borders is … rising, as we have said multiple times…. In our dialogue with the United States and its allies, we will insist on developing concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO and the placement there of weapons systems in the immediate vicinity of Russian territory.”
That comes close to an ultimatum. And NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg backhanded the president of Russia for issuing it:
It’s only Ukraine and 30 NATO allies that decide when Ukraine is ready to join NATO…. Russia has no veto, Russia has no say, and Russia has no right to establish a sphere of influence trying to control their neighbors.
Putin is nobody’s fool, and he has decided to act decisively to free Russia from encirclement. Invasions kill people, and this is sad, but this is the way European power politics operates and has operated for hundreds of years. This is why George Washington in his Farewell Address warned us to stay out of it. “Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.”
Whether Russia controls Ukraine is none of our business. In particular, economic sanctions are a bad idea. They are immoral. As Mike Rozeff says,
Sanctions are wrong for the same reason that dropping a hydrogen bomb on Moscow would be wrong. They target innocent people. They are wrong for the same reason that attacking the Taliban government in Afghanistan was wrong, when bin Laden was the accused. They are wrong for the same reason that attacking Iraq was wrong when Saddam Hussein was the accused target. They are wrong for the same reason that bombing Libya was wrong when Gaddafi was the accused target.
Not only are sanctions wrong; they don’t work, they disrupt the world economy, and they reduce the chances of a peaceful settlement. Rachel Lloyd, a policy analyst at the Russian Public Affairs Committee, says,
Whether sanctions work—or not—is no great secret. Time and time again, the US has clung to sanctions as its de facto power of tough diplomacy. Yet Washington is failing to recognize the obvious reality: they simply do not work, other than perhaps as a tool to bully or with which to play to the crowds.
In fact, tough-sounding economic policies have been shown to almost never have the desired effect against America’s adversaries. Instead, all too often, sanctions bolster those in power, who use the threat of Washington’s overreaching in their domestic affairs as a way to influence national opinion and shore up their support.
The US’s effort to throttle the economy of any country or government that stands against Congress’ vision for how the world should work has brought it into conflict with a number of nations. This has been seen in Iran, where the sanctions put in place after the 1979 revolution fueled the Shia-majority country’s aggressive policies in the Middle East. Likewise, in Cuba, where sanctions have existed for over 60 years, and yet the nation is still dominated by an authoritarian regime…. Businesspeople will point to the fact that the effects of sanctions can go beyond the targeted sector and the individual, hurting Americans well outside the original sanctioned sphere. While the United States may have aimed to restrict business and trade with a particular company or individual, all too often the effects of the sanction seep into other facets of the economy and diplomacy as the targeted country modifies its policies and approaches so as to keep itself afloat.
For Americans, this means reduced revenues for US companies and those who work for them, as well as forfeited opportunities that statistics alone cannot measure. It also puts unnecessary pressure on Americans living abroad, as well as tourists and exchange students, who then have to jump through hoops to complete even the most basic tasks related to banking, finance, and visas.
And for Americans hoping to follow the American dream, starting or expanding businesses, or working abroad, sanctions become a barrier to that dream. The moment a business account has a connection to Russia or another sanctioned country, banks stop wanting to have anything to do with it. When this pinnacle of American entrepreneurism is put under strain due to policies proven to be ineffective at best, there is a glaring problem.
The history of failure, coupled with the factual and potential harm of sanctions to American citizens makes one thing clear: it is disingenuous to say that sanctions are done in the best interest of US national security and the international community. In truth, all they do is set up further barriers to democracy and economic prosperity. Even for Americans.
Some people, including many so-called libertarians reject this message. Don’t we have a duty, they say, to protect “democracy” and resist “aggression”? Murray Rothbard had the best answer to this, and we should heed his wisdom today. We need it.
The collective-security concept that so enchanted the old (pre-1965) left sounded pretty good: Each nation-state was viewed as if it were an individual, so that when one state “aggressed against” another, it became the duty of the governments of the world to step in and punish the “aggressor.” In that way, the bitter and lengthy war in Korea became, in President Truman’s famous phrase, a “police action,” needing no declaration of war but simply an executive decision by the world’s chief cop—the president of the United States—to be set into motion. All other “law-abiding” nations and responsible organs of opinion were supposed to join in.
The “isolationist” right saw several grave flaws in this notion of collective security and the analogy between states and individuals. One, of course, is that there is no world government or world cop, as there are national governments and police. Each state has its own war-making machine, many of which are quite awesome. When gangs of states wade into a conflict, they inexorably widen it. Every tinpot controversy, the latest and most blatant being the fracas in the Falkland Islands, invites other nations to decide which of the states is “the aggressor” and then leap in on the virtuous side. Every local squabble thus threatens to escalate into a global conflagration.
And since, according to collective security enthusiasts, the United States has apparently been divinely appointed to be the chief world policeman, it is thereby justified in throwing its massive weight into every controversy on the face of the globe.
The other big problem with the collective-security analogy is that, in contrast to spotting thieves and muggers, it is generally difficult or even impossible to single out uniquely guilty parties in conflicts between states. For although individuals have well-defined property rights that make someone else’s invasion of that property a culpable act of aggression, the boundary lines of each state have scarcely been arrived at by just and proper means. Every state is born in, and exists by, coercion and aggression over its citizens and subjects, and its boundaries invariably have been determined by conquest and violence. But in automatically condemning one state for crossing the borders of another, we are implicitly recognizing the validity of existing boundaries. Why should the boundaries of a state in 1982 be any more or less just than they were in 1972, 1932, or 1872? Why must they be automatically enshrined as sacred, so much so that a mere boundary crossing should lead every state in the world to force their citizens to kill or die?
No, far better and wiser is the old classical liberal foreign policy of neutrality and nonintervention, a foreign policy set forth with great eloquence by Richard Cobden, John Bright, the Manchester school and other “little Englanders” of the nineteenth century, by the Anti-Imperialist classical liberals of the turn of the twentieth century in Britain and the United States, and by the old right from the 1930s to the 1950s. Neutrality limits conflicts instead of escalating them. Neutral states cannot swell their power through war and militarism, or murder and plunder the citizens of other states.
In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop mock the self-awareness of beltway foreign policy experts lamenting Putin's challenge to "rules-based international order." With countries like India and Brazil increasingly unwilling to follow the lead of America and the West in sanctioning Russia—and actively pointing out the hypocrisy of the US regime—we may be witnessing the end of the post-Cold War unipolar world.
Recommended Reading "The Rules-Based International Order Is Dead. Washington Killed It." by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_76_A
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at Ryan's article, "NATO: Our International Welfare Queens" (Mises.org/RR_75_A), breaking down how American taxpayers are subsidizing European militaries. The two also look at the increasingly aggressive positions taken by smaller NATO members, and the consequences this could have as the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues.
Recommended Reading "NATO: Our International Welfare Queens" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_75_A
"European Environmentalists Have Made Energy Independence Impossible" by Daniel Lacalle: Mises.org/RR_75_B
"It All Comes Back to NATO" by Ron Paul: Mises.org/RR_75_C
"Is NATO a Dead Man Walking?" by José Niño: Mises.org/RR_75_D
"We Must Now Learn the Lesson of 1914, Not the Lesson of 1938." by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_75_E
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Beijing only ever really wanted Moscow around as a way to balance against Washington. But with the US being seen to overtly seek to punish Beijing, this will now only move it closer to Moscow.
Original Article: "A Harder Line with Beijing? Let’s Hope Not."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Europe would have been immeasurably better off had its regimes chosen compromise instead of "countering aggression" in 1914. Sometimes this lesson is heeded, as when the US refused to intervene in 1956 and 1968.
Original Article: "We Must Now Learn the Lesson of 1914, Not the Lesson of 1938."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
There are only two ways human cooperation occurs: through voluntary means or through coercion. The free market stands for voluntary cooperation; coercion and violence are the means of the state.
Original Article: "Markets Are Peaceful but the State Is Not"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The United States is no longer in any position to remake the world in its image. It's not 1945 or even 1970. Yet the US seems to be gearing up to bully half the world into compliance with the US Russia sanctions.
Original Article: "Will Biden Sanction Half the World to Isolate Russia?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
A funny thing has happened on the way to accepting the standard ruling-class narrative on the war in Ukraine: inconvenient and unpleasant facts about the region and its recent history.
Original Article: "Facing Unpleasant Facts: What You aren’t Supposed to say about the War in Ukraine"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Those gloating about Russia being "cut off" are overstating the case. In fact, many of the world's largest countries have shown a reluctance to participate in the US's sanction schemes, and even close US allies aren't going along with it.
Original Article: "Russia Isn't Nearly as Isolated as Washington Wants You to Believe"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
From the Volga Germans to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire to the Spaniards and the Mennonites, choosing emigration as a means of avoiding military conscription has a long history.
Original Article: "America Has Long Been a Haven for Draft Dodgers from Foreign Lands"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Sanctions remain popular because they placate the voters who insist "we" must "do something," and government officials are more than happy to accept this invitation to grow state power.
Original Article: "Why Sanctions Don't Work, and Why They Mostly Hurt Ordinary People"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
President Harding wanted to see the end of war and a return to a more traditional American foreign policy.
Original Article: "The Triumphant Foreign Policy of Warren G. Harding"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The Ukrainian regime thinks it knows better than husbands and fathers when it comes to caring for their families. But no bureaucrat ought to be allowed to make such a decision.
Original Article: "Ukraine's Regime Is Now Kidnapping Fathers for Military 'Service'"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
From economic power to demographics to military spending, Russia simply doesn't have the ability to be a great power that threatens anyone outside its "near abroad."
Original Article: "Russian Weakness and the Russian "Threat" to the West"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
This week, Jeff and Bob discuss oil prices. Why are gas prices spiking in the US, and what are D.C. politicians planning for oil companies?
Jeff and Bob discuss Biden's SOTU, the immorality of sanctions, and Fed chair Powell's pregnant comments.
In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop discuss the fallout from the first week of the Ukraine-Russian conflict. What is the impact on American politics? Are Western leaders capable of de-escalation? What will be the lasting impact on other geopolitical fronts?
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Last week I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s important letter to the New York Times in June 1942 about the Nazi economy. In the letter, Mises says that foreign trade poses a difficult problem for a socialist economy. Unlike the citizens of a country controlled by central planning, those in foreign countries don’t have to accept goods offered to them, and bureaucrats, who operate by fixed rules, cannot cope with this situation. Elsewhere in his work, Mises has much more to say about this topic, and in this week’s column, I will discuss some of his insights, stressing the connection between socialist planning and war.
One theme that again and again occurs in Mises’s work is that in a capitalist market with complete free trade, national boundaries do not matter. The buyers and sellers of goods will always buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, regardless of the country in which the goods are located. He says in Socialism:
Under Capitalism, as Free Traders would have it, frontiers would be without significance. Trade would flow over them unhindered. They would prohibit neither the movement of the most suitable producers towards immobile means of production, nor the investment of mobile means of production in the most suitable places. Ownership of the means of production would be independent of citizenship. Foreign investment would be as easy as investment at home. (p. 235)
This isn’t the case in a socialist economy. The planners want to have everything under their control, and thus, to the greatest extent feasible, they want economic autarky, in which all production is internal rather than external. Mises points out in his 1942 letter that Stalinist Russia came much closer to this goal than Nazi Germany. Mises explains this tendency to autarky in Omnipotent Government:
Interventionism aims at state control of market conditions. As the sovereignty of the national state is limited to the territory subject to its supremacy and has no jurisdiction outside its boundaries, it considers all kinds of international economic relations as serious obstacles to its policy. The ultimate goal of its foreign trade policy is economic self-sufficiency. The avowed tendency of this policy is, of course, only to reduce imports as far as possible; but as exports have no purpose but to pay for imports, they drop concomitantly. The striving after economic self-sufficiency is even more violent in the case of socialist governments. In a socialist community production for domestic consumption is no longer directed by the tastes and wishes of the consumers. The central board of production management provides for the domestic consumer according to its own ideas of what serves him best; it takes care of the people but it no longer serves the consumer. But it is different with production for export. Foreign buyers are not subject to the authorities of the socialist state; they have to be served; their whims and fancies have to be taken into account. The socialist government is sovereign in purveying to the domestic consumers, but in its foreign-trade relations it encounters the sovereignty of the foreign consumer. On foreign markets it has to compete with other producers producing better commodities at lower cost. (pp. 72–73)
If a country does not have sufficient natural resources to make autarky practicable, what can it do? Mises’s answer is that the socialist planners will try to seize these resources from other countries, which of course means war. Writing in 1944, he said:
German aggressive nationalism is animated by these considerations. For more than sixty years German nationalists have been depicting the consequences which the protectionist policies of other nations must eventually have for Germany. Germany, they pointed out, cannot live without importing food and raw materials. How will it pay for these imports when one day the nations producing these materials have succeeded in the development of their domestic manufactures and bar access to German exports? There is, they told themselves, only one redress: We must conquer more dwelling space, more Lebensraum. The German nationalists are fully aware that many other nations— for example, Belgium—are in the same unfavorable position. But, they say, there is a very important difference. These are small nations. They are therefore helpless. Germany is strong enough to conquer more space. And, happily for Germany, they say today, there are two other powerful nations, which are in the same position as Germany, namely, Italy and Japan. They are the natural allies of Germany in these wars of the have-nots against the haves. Germany does not aim at autarky because it is eager to wage war. It aims at war because it wants autarky—because it wants to live in economic self-sufficiency. (p. 74)
His analysis is of course not limited to the concrete situation of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. He says that if a number of socialist nations exist at the same time, constant wars are likely to result:
There are two possibilities for world-embracing socialism: the coexistence of independent socialist states on the one hand, or the establishment of a unitary world-embracing socialist government on the other. The first system would stabilize existing inequalities. There would be richer nations and poorer ones, countries both underpopulated and overpopulated. If mankind had introduced this system a hundred years ago, it would have been impossible to exploit the oil fields of Mexico or Venezuela, to establish the rubber plantations in Malaya, or to develop the banana production of Central America. The nations concerned lacked both the capital and trained men to utilize their own natural resources. A socialist scheme is not compatible with foreign investment, international loans, payments of dividends and interest, and all such capitalist institutions…. Inevitably war and conquest result. The workers of the comparatively overpopulated areas invade the comparatively underpopulated areas, conquer these countries, and annex them. And then follow wars between the conquerors for the distribution of the booty. Every nation is prepared to believe that it has not obtained its fair share, that other nations have got too much and should be forced to abandon a part of their plunder. Socialism in independent nations would result in endless wars. (pp. 108–09)
Mises offers us an acute structural account of the drive for aggressive war, as useful today as it was when he wrote it over seventy-five years ago.
Ryan and Tho discuss Taiwan policy with Zachary Yost, author of a new paper on the prospects of a Mainland Chinese takeover of Taiwan. China faces some very large obstacles, but so does the United States.
Recommended Reading "Victory Without Battle: A Smarter Vision for US-Taiwan Policy " by Zachary Yost (PDF): Mises.org/RR_67_A
"China’s Military Strength Has Been Greatly Exaggerated" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_67_B
"The US Military Isn't As Invincible As It Thinks" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_67_C
"A Fat, Comfortable Military Is a Woke Military" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_67_D
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Trust in the US military has plummeted according to a recent survey, and conservative Americans may finally realize that the military is just a wing of the woke, progressive American establishment.
Original Article: "Americans May Finally Be Losing Confidence in the Woke Military"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The transformation of Jeffersonians into National Republicans continues under President James Madison. Following the Louisiana Purchase, the new administration sets its eyes on Florida and Canada for new American expansion. The result is the disastrous War of 1812 and the rise of a new central bank.
Recommended Reading "The Feds Before the Fed" by Scott Trask — Mises.org/LP6_A
"Our Oligarchs Can Thank James Madison" by Ryan McMaken — Mises.org/LP6_B
"Why James Madison Hated Democracy" by Ryan McMaken — Mises.org/LP6_C
Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849 by Patrick Newman — Mises.org/LP_Crony
To subscribe to the Liberty vs. Power Podcast on your favorite platform, visit Mises.org/LvP.
After many months of covid stimulus, there's a bonanza in US pandemic profits. But unlike price inflation, these profits really are likely to be transitory.
Original Article: "How Easy Money Inflated Corporate Profits"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The true cost of America's wars—in lost productivity, resources, and opportunity cost—is far higher than even the official numbers of trillions spent on the Pentagon's many failures.
Original Article: "America's Wars Are Far More Costly than the Pentagon Admits"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The historian Allen C. Guelzo in the epilogue to his rather hostile Robert E. Lee: A Life (Knopf, 2021) raises important questions about the value of nationalism that I’d like to discuss in this week’s column. Guelzo has favorable things to say about some of Lee’s personal qualities, but in his mind Lee committed one unforgiveable sin—he betrayed his native country. I don’t think that Lee was guilty of treason, not, at any rate, if you look at the definition of that crime in the US Constitution, but that isn’t the main issue I want to discuss here.
Before getting to what Guelzo says in his epilogue, we should recognize that people generally feel attached to their country, and this is a good thing. In the familiar words of Sir Walter Scott, “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!” Ludwig von Mises in Socialism speaks in a related way of people who fight for their country’s survival:
When society’s existence is threatened, each individual must risk his best to avoid destruction. Even the prospect of perishing in the attempt can no longer deter him. For there is then no choice between either living on as one formerly lived or sacrificing oneself for one’s country, for society, or for one’s convictions. Rather, must the certainty of death, servitude, or insufferable poverty be set against the chance of returning victorious from the struggle.”
We’ll see later that the rest of this passage offers a clue to what is right and wrong about nationalism.
We’re now in a position to look at Geulzo’s epilogue. He criticizes two people for what they say about nationalism: one is the political philosopher A. John Simmons and the other is Murray Rothbard. He quotes Simmons as saying that membership in a nation-state “does not free a man from the burdens of moral reasoning” (p. 433) and suggests this gives inadequate recognition to national loyalty. On reading this, I wondered whether Guelzo was serious. Can he really believe that national loyalty is so important that the aim of keeping your nation together obviates the need for moral reasoning? Would it be all right to commit any atrocity, no matter how grave, if this were required to preserve your nation? That is a doctrine more suited to European fascism than to any doctrine recognizably American.
Guelzo criticizes Rothbard as an example of libertarians for whom “the charge of treason loses its taint of moral betrayal and becomes a mechanism by which an all-powerful state prevents dangers” to its own existence (p. 433). He gives a citation to Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State, pp. 45–46.
If you look up these pages, you will see that as usual, Rothbard is right on target. He says that the state uses accusations of disloyalty and treason to get people to fight for the government. A political system has value only to the extent that it helps individuals to survive and prosper. In Rothbard’s words,
War and revolution, as the two basic threats, invariably arouse in the State rulers their maximum efforts and maximum propaganda among the people. As stated above, any way must always be used to mobilize the people to come to the State’s defense in the belief that they are defending themselves. The fallacy of the idea becomes evident when conscription is wielded against those who refuse to “defend” themselves and are, therefore, forced into joining the State’s military band: needless to add, no “defense” is permitted them against this act of “their own” State…. We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely—those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.
In brief, the feeling of attachment to your own native land should never be confused with allegiance to a particular government. If we continue with the quotation from Mises given above, we see that he too makes the essential point that fighting for your country is valuable to the extent it protects your interest as an individual. You aren’t committing “treason” if you refuse to fight to preserve the government. Mises says,
War carried on pro aris et focis [for hearth and home] demands no sacrifice from the individual. One does not engage in it merely to reap benefits for others, but to preserve one’s own existence. This of course, is only true of wars in which individuals fight for their very existence. It is not true of wars which are merely a means of enrichment, such as the quarrels of feudal lords or the cabinet wars of princes. Thus Imperialism, ever covetous of conquests, cannot do without an ethic which demands from the individual “sacrifices” for the “good of the State.”
There is another problem in Guelzo’s book, and this returns us to his accusation that Lee committed treason. The feeling of attachment to your own land does not delimit the proper boundaries of your land. Lee’s “country” was his own native state above the federal union; what is the matter with that? Feelings of loyalty to your nation are valuable to the extent they ward off attempts to subject people to international government bureaucracies, as in the recent Brexit movement, but they do not properly rule out secessionist movements, which themselves rest on attachment to a people’s own land.
The US and NATO must do as little as possible to contribute to the conflict in Ukraine. This especially includes continuing to arm Ukraine and insisting that it has a future in NATO.
Original Article: "The West Must Stop Trying To Expand NATO into Ukraine"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The more the EU micromanages Polish internal affairs and punishes Poland for the simple act of exercising self-determination, more the benefits of leaving the bloc altogether will continue to increase.
Original Article: "Poland's Beef with the EU Shows the Dangers of Political Centralization"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Biden's team is dominated by liberal internationalists, and just as their aggressive approach to China is the wrong one to take in the Indo-Pacific, it has long been counterproductive in eastern and southern Europe.
Original Article: "It's Time for the US To Stop Courting Conflict with Russia"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Combined with the US military’s turn toward “woke” politics, this latest episode around vaccine mandates will further help to undermine support for military institutions among conservatives and Republicans.
Original Article: "The Oklahoma National Guard Refused the Vax Mandate. The Pentagon Is Not Pleased."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The US military's turn to "wokeness" is a result of decades of high military spending and public deference toward military "experts." That gave us a military that is overfunded and highly political.
Original Article: "A Fat, Comfortable Military Is a "Woke" Military"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute joins the show to discuss what might be termed the Ron Paul Doctrine: a combination of laissez-faire at home, decentralized domestic political power (up to and including secession), robust free trade, and strict non-intervention abroad, This doctrine—which mirrors Mises's prescription for a liberal society—makes no phony distinctions between foreign and domestic policy, or between military and economic interventions. It places peace and property at the center of a free society, and calls for humility rather than hubris in politics. Daniel also gives his thoughts on Dr. Paul's doctrine as it applies today to China, Turkey, Russia, and Iran.
Anyone with a conscience can easily see that assassinating Julian Assange would be just plain murder. Yet, the reaction to all this from the mainstream press has been one great big collective yawn.
Original Article: "The CIA Has Stultified American Consciences"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Until there’s a new foreign policy class informed by an outlook of restraint, no kind of punishment or demotion of those who prosecuted the bungled wars of the past few decades should be expected.
Original Article: "Don’t Expect Foreign Policy Experts to be Held Accountable for Afghanistan"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
After 9/11, the security establishment was giddy about embarking on a global democratic crusade against any nation that did not submit to the US’s liberal hegemonic order.
Original Article: "The US’s Fantastical Foreign Policy: Sowing the Seeds of Failure"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Hopefully, increased interdependence and overlapping interests will help to shape a future of stability in Europe and continue the precious absence of another major war on the continent.
Original Article: "Nord Stream 2: The Value of German-Russian Cooperation"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Washington politicos want to keep the debt going up at breakneck speed forever. But the responsible thing to do is refuse another increase to the debt ceiling and force a partial default. Politicians hate that idea because default would make it harder to spend trillions in deficit spending.
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
While the US was able to give the Soviets a bloody nose by pouring billions into the mujahideen, it’s undeniable the US created a Frankenstein's monster that ended up turning on its creator.
Original Article: "The Roots of the Afghanistan War"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
As US military interventions continue across several continents, we should remember that much of US foreign policy is little more than cleaning up messes the US created.
Original Article: "The Loss in Afghanistan Is Only the Latest Chapter in a Long Story of Intervention"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Moyn fears that "humane warfare" along with programs of global surveillance, would subject the world to hegemonic control by one or a few dominant superpowers.
Original Article: "Should War Be Made 'Humane'?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
For the foreign-policy non-interventionist, some schools of thought in international relations are much better than others. "Liberal hegemony" (the favored school of neoconservatives) has long supported endless war and intervention by the US regime worldwide. We discuss how we can use "realist" research to move the foreign policy needle away from liberal hegemony and toward a more sane foreign policy.
Guest: Zachary Yost (Mises.org/Yost) is a Marcellus Policy Fellow with the John Quincy Adams Society.
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
China faces a wide variety of demographic, geopolitical, and economic limits on the regime's power. And, socialism and Keynesianism don't work any better in China than in the USA. Moreover, contrary to the myth, China is not run by politicians who are brilliant geniuses who "play the long game."
Additional Reading "China’s Military Strength Has Been Greatly Exaggerated" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_59_Article1
"China's Biggest Problem Isn't Trump, It's a Broken Banking System" by Tho Bishop: Mises.org/RR_59_Article2
"If the US Wants to Beat China, Why Is It Copying China's Socialism?" by Mihai Macovei: Mises.org/RR_59_Article3
"China’s Military Strength Has Been Greatly Exaggerated" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_59_Article4
"China Won't Be Taking Over the World" by Joseph Solis-Mullen: Mises.org/RR_59_Article5
"The China Model Is Unsustainable" by Doug French: Mises.org/RR_59_Article6
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Life in American changed twenty years ago after the 9/11 attacks. Many Americans became enraged at anyone who did not swear allegiance to Bush’s antiterrorism crusade.
Original Article: "Remember When Conservatives "Canceled" Anyone against the War on Terror? I Do."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
In every great war monetary calculation was disrupted by inflation. … The economic behavior of the belligerents was thereby led astray; the true consequences of the war were removed from their view. One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier.Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time, trans. Leland B. Yeager (New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 163.
[Governments] know that their young men will readily sacrifice their lives and limbs and that their old men will readily sacrifice the lives and limbs of their sons and grandsons, and that their women will readily sacrifice the lives and limbs of their husbands, their sons, and their brothers in what they believe to be a noble cause, but they have a deadly fear— sometimes, but not always, well founded—that women and old men will shrink from pinching the stomachs of themselves and the young children, so that warlike enthusiasm will decay if it once gets about that the association of war with abundance to eat, drink, and wear is delusive, and that there is still truth in the old motto of “Peace and plenty.”… True that to be pinched by high prices rather than by small money incomes and large taxes made the people rage in the first place against the persons who were supposed to profit and often did profit—most of them quite innocently—by the rise of prices instead of against Government.E. Cannan, An Economist’s Protest (New York: Adelphi Company, 1928), p. 100; idem, Money: Its connexion with Rising and Falling Prices, 6th ed. (Westminster: P.S. King & Son, Ltd., 1929), p. 99.
[T]he true costs of the war lie in the goods sphere: the usedup goods, the devastation of parts of the country, the loss of manpower, these are the real costs of war to the economies.… Like a huge conflagration the war has devoured a huge part of our national wealth, the economy has become poorer.… However, in money terms the economy has not become poorer. How is this possible? Simply … claims on the state and money tokens have taken the place of stocks of goods in the private economy.J.A. Schumpeter, “The Crisis of the Tax State,” in idem, The Econmics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 118–19.
“War, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin’.It ain’t nothin’ but a heartbreakerIts got one friend, that’s the undertaker.…War can’t give life, it can only take it away.”E. Starr, “Recording of ‘War,’” written by N. Whitfield and B. Strong, from the album War & Peace (Detroit: Motown Record Corporation, 1970).
- Introduction The costs of war are enormous, as the above quotations trenchantly indicate, and inflation is a means by which governments attempt, more or less successfully, to hide these costs from their citizens. War not only destroys the lives and limbs of the soldiery, but, by progressively consuming the accumulated capital stock of the belligerent nations, eventually shortens and coarsens the lives and shrivels the limbs of the civilian population. The enormous destruction of productive wealth that war entails would become immediately evident if governments had no recourse but to raise taxes immediately upon the advent of hostilities; their ability to inflate the money supply at will permits them to conceal such destruction behind a veil of rising prices, profits, and wages, stable interest rates, and a booming stock market.
In the following section I explain how war, completely apart from its physical destructiveness, brings about the economic destruction of capital and a consequent decline in labor productivity, real income, and living standards. The argument in this section draws on the Austrian theory of capital as expounded in the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Section 3 analyzes the reasons why different methods of war financing will have different effects on the public’s perceptions of the costs attending economic mobilization for war. The analysis developed in this section owes much to the classic discussion of inflationary war financing by Mises.Mises, Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 151–71 Section 4 concludes the paper with a brief explanation of how inflation constitutes the first step on the road to the fascist economic planning that is typically foisted upon capitalist economies in the course of a large-scale war.
- The Economics of War The conduct of war requires that scarce resources previously allocated to the production of capital or consumer goods be reallocated to the raising, equipping, and sustaining of the nation’s fighting forces. While the newly enlisted or inducted military personnel must abandon their jobs in the private economy, they still require food, clothing, and shelter, in addition to weapons and other accoutrements of war. In practice this means that “nonspecific” resources such as labor and “convertible” capital goods including steel, electrical power, trucks, etc., which are not specific to a single production process, must be diverted from civilian to military production. Given the reduction in the size of the civilian labor force and the conversion of substantial amounts of the remaining labor and capital to the manufacture of military hardware, the general result is a greater scarcity of consumer goods and a decline of real wages and civilian living standards.
However, the transformation of the economy to a war footing implies much more than merely a “horizontal” reallocation of factors from consumer goods to military production. It also entails a “vertical” shift of resources from the “higher” stages of production to the “lower” stages of production, that is, from the production and maintenance of capital goods temporally remote from the service of the ultimate consumers to the production of war goods for present use. For, as Mises Ibid., pp. 168. points out, “War can be waged only with present goods.” but, in substituting the production of tanks, bombs, and small arms destined for immediate use for the replacement and repair of mining and oil drilling equipment intended to maintain the flow of future consumer goods, the economy is shortening its time structure of production and thus “consuming” its capital. Initially, this capital consumption is manifested in the idleness of fixed capital goods that cannot be converted to immediate war production, e.g., plant and equipment producing oil drilling machinery, and the simultaneous over-utilization of fixed capital goods that can be so converted, e.g., auto assembly plants now used to produce military vehicles. In the short-run, then, the flow of present goods or “real income,” in the form of war goods and consumer goods, may actually rise, even in the face of a loss of part of the labor force to military service. But as years pass, and industrial and agricultural equipment is worn out and not replaced, real income inevitably declines—possibly precipitously— below its previous peacetime level.
SchumpeterSchumpeter, “The Crisis of the Tax State,” p. 127. has provided a graphic summary of the horizontal and vertical shifts of resources caused by the exigencies of a war economy, and the deleterious effect of the vertical shift on the capital stock:
First, “war economy” essentially means switching the economy from production for the needs of a peaceful life to production for the needs of warfare. This means in the first place that the available means of production are used in some part to produce different final goods, chiefly of course war materials, and in the most part to produce the same products as before but for other customers than in peacetime. This means,furthermore, that the available means of production are mainly used to produce as many goods for immediate consumption as possible to the detriment of the production of means of production-particularly machinery and industrial plant—so that that part of production that in peacetime takes up so much room, namely the production for the maintenance and expansion of the productive apparatus, decreases more and more. The possibility to do just this, that is to use for immediate consumption goods, labor, and capital which previously had made producer’s goods and thus only indirectly contributed to the production of consumer’s goods (i.e., which made “future” rather than “present” goods, to use the technical terminology), this possibility was our great reserve which has saved us so far and which has prevented the stream of consumer’s goods from drying up completely.… Our poverty will be brought home to us to its full extent only after the war. Only then will the worn-out machines, the run-down buildings, the neglected land, the decimated livestock, the devastated forests, bear witness to the full depth of the effects of the war.
In commenting upon the effects of World War I on the British economy, Edwin CannanCannan, An Economist’s Protest, p. 183. also drew attention to the crucial fact of the vertical shift of resources and the capital consumption it implies, observing that
… during the war addition to material equipment at home and foreign property abroad wholly ceased. The labor thus set free was made available for war production and for the production of immediately-consumable peace-goods.
[Moreover] everyone conversant with business knows that renewals, if not repairs, have been very seriously postponed in all branches of production and that stocks of everything have run down enormously. The labor which would in ordinary times have been keeping up the material equipment was diverted to war-production and the production of immediately consumable peace-goods.… It was chiefly the tapping of these resources that enabled the country as a whole to get through the war with so little privation.
It may be objected that empirically, the vertical shift of resources is likely to be trivial, because “investment” constitutes such a small segment of real output and therefore the increase in the output of war goods must come mainly from resources diverted from the consumer goods industries combined with a reduction of the leisure of the civilian population, i.e., through increased overtime and labor participation rates. But this fallacious consumer-belt-tightening theory of war economy is based on the Keynesian national income accounting framework, according to which capital investment constitutes a small fraction of total GDP. For example, during the fourth quarter of 1994, the annual rate of real gross private investment in the U.S. totaled $939.7 billion or slightly more than 17 percent of real GDP while real personal consumption expenditures in the same quarter equaled $3629.6 billion or almost 67 percent of real GDP.Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, National Economic Trends (May 1995), pp. 4, 18–19.
Unfortunately, in this framework the investment in “intermediate inputs” is netted out to avoid “double counting.” These intermediate inputs to a great extent comprise precisely those types of capital goods, namely, stocks of raw materials, semi finished products, and energy inputs, that can most readily be converted for use in the production of present goods, whether for military or consumption purposes. As MisesMises, Nation, State, and Economy, p. 162. observes, this is one form that capital consumption took in Germany during the First World War: “The German economy entered the war with an abundant stock of raw materials and semi-finished goods of all kinds. In peacetime, whatever of these stocks were devoted to use or consumption was regularly replaced. During the war the stocks were consumed without being able to be replaced. They disappeared out of the economy; the national wealth was reduced by their value.” These future or higher-stage goods permanently “disappeared” because the resources previously invested in their reproduction had been withdrawn in order to augment the production of war materials.
In fact, in a modern capital-using economy, at any given moment during peacetime, the aggregate value of resources devoted to production and maintenance of capital goods in the higher stages of production far exceeds the value of resources working to directly serve consumers in the final stage of the production process. As an example, for the U.S. economy in 1982 total business expenditures on intermediate inputs plus gross private investment totaled $3,196.7 billion while personal consumer expenditures totaled $2,046.4 billion. Over 6o percent of the available productive resources, outside the government sector, was therefore devoted to the production of capital, or future, goods as opposed to consumer, or present, goods.M. Skousen, The Structure of Production (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 191–92.,On the critical importance, for analyzing the capital structure, of using a concept of “gross investment” that includes both investment in fixed capital and investment in intermediate inputs in all stages of production, see M.N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, 2nd ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, [1962] 1993), vol. 1, pp. 339–45.
- The Financing of War Governments have at their disposal three methods for financing a war: taxation, borrowing from the public, and monetary inflation or the creation of new money. Governments may also resort to coercive requisitioning, that is, confiscating the material resources and conscripting the labor services they deem necessary for the war effort without compensation or in exchange for below-market prices and wage rates. Historically, a combination of these methods has generally been used to effect the transfer of resources from civilian to military uses during a large-scale war. From the viewpoint of technical economic theory, however, the government could always realize the funds necessary to carry out its war aims exclusively from increased taxation and noninflationary borrowing on capital markets. As SchumpeterSchumpeter, “The Crisis of the Tax State,” p. 121. pointed out with regard to Austria, immediately after the First World War, “It is clear … that strictly speaking we could have squeezed the necessary money out of the private economy just as the goods were squeezed out of it. This could have been done by taxes which would have looked stifling, but which would in fact have been no more oppressive than the devaluation of money which was their alternative.Despite his general stance against inflationary financing of war, Schumpeter (“The Crisis of the Tax State,” p. 121), does concede that “… it is everywhere impossible completely to cover the cost of war by taxation, from the point of view both of politics and fiscal technique.” Mises (Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 151–71) and Cannan (Money: Its Connexion with Rising and Falling Prices, pp. 93–102) are even firmer than Schumpeter in their views that inflation is not technically necessary to finance a major war. For the latter two, whatever quantity of resources can be extracted from the private economy by inflationary finance can also be appropriated via taxation and non-inflationary borrowing. It should be noted however that Mises (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 165) maintained that market incentives could never be rendered attractive enough in practice to attract sufficient manpower to serve in the the armed forces under war conditions and that, therefore, conscription was a necessary supplement to market transactions financed by taxes and borrowing. Mises here not only argues that the supply curve of enlistees is inelastic but also implicitly assumes that it is fixed under all circumstances, seemingly ignoring the possibility that a spontaneous shift to the right in the supply curve will occur in the case of a war fought in defense of hearth and home or for a cause that is widely and passionately believed to be just.
Why, then, if strictly fiscal measures are capable of yielding sufficient revenues to pay market prices for all the resources required to conduct war, have belligerent governments almost always had recourse to the methods of monetary inflation and the direct commandeering of commodities and services? The answer lies in the fact that war is an extremely costly enterprise and the latter two methods, although in very different ways, operate to partially conceal these costs from the public’s view.Not all pre-Keynesian economics acceded to the view of Mises, Schumpeter, and Cannan that inflation is not theoretically or practically necessary for financing a major war. Two of their prominent contemporaries, A.C. Pigou (The Political Economy of War, 2nd ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1941]) and Lionel Robbins (The Economic Problem in Peace and War: Some Reflections on Objectives and Mechanisms [London: Macmillan, 1950]) insisted that inflationary finance and direct government controls are an inescapable part of a war economy. Beginning in the early post-World War II era, neo-Keynesian economists like Keynes himself totally innocent of capital theory, turned the older approach to war economics on its head, arguing that war spending, like any other kind of spending, operating through the multiplier process, automatically generates full employment and, therefore, economic prosperity and is likely to create an “inflationary gap” in the macroeconomy They therefore concluded that the conduct of war is inherently inflationary and necessitates extensive government controls over prices, production and labor markets to repress inflation and prevent it from undermining the war economy. For examples of the neo-Keynesian approach to “defense” economics, see A.G. Hart (Defense without Inflation [New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1951]) and D.H. Wallace (Economic Controls and Defense [New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1953]). Robert Higgs (“Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s,” The Journal of Economic History 52 [March]: pp. 41–60) provides a superb and long-overdue demolition of the Keynesian claim that World War II brought prosperity to the U.S. economy. When the public is accurately apprised of its full costs, war becomes increasingly unpopular, civilian enthusiasm and labor efforts flag, and unrest and even active resistance may ensue on the home front and spread to the front lines. The movement for “revolutionary defeatism” successfully fomented by Russia’s Bolsheviks during World War I is just one example of such mass resistance.
As Robert HiggsRobert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University, 1987), p. 65. points out with regard to the tendency of governments to partially substitute a command-and-control economy for the regular fiscal mechanism during wartime and other so-called national emergencies:
Obviously, citizens will not react to the costs they bear if they are unaware of them. The possibility of driving a wedge between the actual and the publicly perceived costs creates a strong temptation for governments pursuing high-cost policies during national emergencies. Except where lives are being sacrificed, no costs are so easily counted as pecuniary costs. Not only can each individual count them (his own tax bill); they can be easily aggregated for the whole society (the government’s total tax revenue). It behooves a government wishing to sustain a policy that entails suddenly heightened costs to find ways of substituting non-pecuniary for pecuniary costs. The substitution may blunt the citizen’s realization of how great their sacrifices really are and hence diminish their protests and resistance.
The direct expropriation of resources works best when the resources in question are non-reproducible, as in the case of labor. By legally compelling its citizen-subjects to serve a specified term in military service at wage rates far below market levels, the government significantly reduces the budgetary costs of war and thus the amount by which it must ratchet up taxes. The cost concealment this facilitates explains the widespread use of mass conscription especially by almost all modern mass democracies, beginning with revolutionary France. But uncompensated confiscation of reproducible resources confronts an insuperable difficulty: while it does yield access to existing stocks of resources, it destroys the incentive on the part of private individuals and firms to reproduce these resources.
Continuation of industrial production processes requires pecuniary compensation to the producers as determined by the market, unless the government is willing to completely abolish exchange and implement a totally moneyless (and particularly chaotic) form of socialism, in which resources are allocated and the products distributed by bureaucratic ukase. This was attempted by the Bolsheviks during the period known as War Communism in the U.S.S.R. from 1918 to 1921 and proved a miserable failure.F.H. Carr (A History of Soviet Russia, Vol. 2, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–23 [Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1971], pp. 151–268) and Alec Nove (An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. [Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc., 1972], pp. 46–82) provide comprehensive descriptions of the policies and events that marked the period of War communism. Paul Craig Roberts (Alienation and the Soviet Economy: Toward a General Theory of Marxian Alienation, Organizational Principles and the Soviet Economy [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971], pp. 20–47) convincingly argues the revisionist case that War Communism was not a wartime expedient adopted willy-nilly by hapless soviet authorities but the deliberate application of Marxian doctrine. While governments of mass democracies in fact went a long way toward replacing market incentives and processes with substantial elements of the centrally-planned or command-and-control economy during the two great wars of the twentieth century, at least at the inception of hostilities they still required a cost-concealing device that would yield them the money revenues with which to purchase real resources from their still-operative money-exchange economies. For this purpose, they consolidated the power to issue money in the hands of their central banks. Thus it was, for example, that within days of the outbreak of World War I each and every one of the belligerent governments suspended the operation of the gold standard, effectively arrogating to itself the monopoly of the supply of money in its own national territory.
To grasp how the issuing of new money obscures and distorts the true costs of war, we first must analyze the case of financing a war exclusively through the imposition of increased taxes supplemented with borrowing from the public. Prior to the increase of taxes and issue of government securities to raise war revenues, the national economy is operating with an aggregate capital structure whose size is determined by the “time preferences” or inter-temporal consumption choices of the consumer-savers. The lower the public’s time preferences, and therefore the more willing its members are to postpone consumption from the immediate to the more remote future, the greater is the proportion of current income that is saved and invested in building up an integrated stucture of capital goods. The greater the stock of capital goods, in turn, the greater the productivity of labor and the higher the real wage rate earned by all classes of workers.For detailed explications of the time-preference theory of interest, see Rothbard (Man, Economy, and State, vol. 1., pp. 313–86) and Ludwig von Mises (Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 3rd ed. [Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1966], pp. 479–536. A recent defense and clarification of the theory is presented by by I.M. Kirzner (“The Pure Time-Preference Theory of Interest: An Attempt at Clarification,” in The Meaning of Ludwig von Mises: Contribution in Economics, Sociology, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy, J.M. Herbener, ed. [Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993], pp. 166–92) while R.W. Garrison (“Professor Rothbard and the Theory of Interest,” in Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, W. Block and L.H. Rockwell, Jr., eds. [Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988], pp. 44–55) offers an illuminating and concise overview.
From the point of view of individual investors in the capital structure—business proprietors, stockholders, bondholders, insurance policyholders—the values of their titles and claims to capital goods are revealed by monetary calculation, specifically, capital accounting, and are therefore conceived as sums of monetary wealth.As Mises (Human Action, p. 230) explains: “Monetary calculation reaches its full perfection in capital accounting. It establishes the money prices of the available means and confronts this total with changes brought about by action and by the operation of other factors. This confrontation shows what changes occurred in the state of the acting men’s affairs and the magnitude of those changes; it makes success and failure, profit and loss ascertainable.” The accumulation or consumption of capital will always be readily evident in the changing monetary wealth positions of at least some individuals, assuming the purchasing power of money is roughly stable. It will especially be manifested in movements in the stock and real estate markets, which are devoted largely to the exchange of titles to aggregates of capital goods.Thus, as M.N. Rothbard (America’s Great Depression [Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, Inc., [1963] 1975], pp. 75, 316 fn. 29) points out, “Stocks … are units of title to masses of capital goods” and “… real estate convey[s] units of title of capital in land.” In addition, enlargements or diminutions of the capital stock will be manifested in fluctuations in current incomes—in aggregate pecuniary profits in the economy and in the general levels of salaries and wages.
As pointed out above, large-scale war involves a marked increase in preferences for present goods and necessitates a thoroughgoing reorientation of society’s productive apparatus away from future and toward present goods. To effectuate this temporal restructuring of production in a money-exchange economy, there must occur a radical alteration in the proportions of money expenditure, with consumption and military spending rising relative to saving-investment. Regardless of what technique is utilized to accomplish this shift in relative expenditure, it must give rise to a “retrogressing economy” during the transition to the war economy. The retrogressing economy is one characterized by a declining capital stock. Its onset is marked by a “crisis” involving aggregate business losses, rising interest rates, plunging stock, bond, and real estate markets, and a deflation of financial asset values.For an explanation of the concept of a retrogressing economy and the accompanying crisis, see Rothbard (Man, Economy, and State, vol. 1, pp. 483–86) and Mises (Human Action, pp. 250–51, pp. 298–300).
When taxes are raised to finance the war, the crisis is immediately evident. In order to pay their increased tax liabilities, citizens retrench on their saving as well as their consumption. In fact, they reduce their saving proportionally more than their consumption, for two reasons. First, assuming an increase in the income tax, the net interest return on investment is lowered, meaning that the investor can now expect less future consumption in exchange for a given amount of saving or abstinence from present consumption. If his time preference remains unchanged, the worsened terms of trade between present and future goods encourages the taxpayer to escape the tax by increasing spending on present consumption and reducing saving and, thereby, his prospects for future consumption. With all saver-investors responding in this manner, the aggregate supply of savings will decrease and the interest rate will be driven up to reflect the increased tax on investment income.
Second, moreover, because the incidence of the increased tax always falls on his present income and monetary assets, it leaves the taxpayer less well-provided with present goods. As his supply of present goods diminishes toward the bare subsistence level—at which point the premium he attaches to present over future consumption becomes approximately infinite—the individual experiences a progressive rise in his time preference, and the prevailing (after-tax) interest rate no longer suffices as adequate compensation for sustaining his current level of saving-investment. He accordingly further reduces the proportion of his income allocated to saving investment.On these two effects of the income tax, see Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, vol. 2, pp. 797–99.
Finally, as a means of quickly generating the enormous revenues typically required at the outset of a large-scale war, the government might seek to tap, in addition to current income, accumulated capital. This most likely would involve a wealth tax that is levied on each household in some proportion to the market value of the property it owns, including and especially its cash balances. The tax, if it were uniformly enforced on all categories of wealth, would force capitalist-entrepreneurs to liquidate or issue debt against their real assets in order to discharge their tax liability. By its very nature, then, a wealth tax results directly in the consumption of capital. Moreover, even though such a tax is levied on net wealth accumulated in the past, it operates to powerfully increase time preferences and reduce savings even further, because it must be paid out of present income and monetary assets and the prospect of its recurrence can easily be precluded by completely consuming income as it is received and by consuming whatever privately owned capital remains.An analysis of taxes on accumulated capital or wealth can be found in M.N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, Inc., 1970), pp. 83–84, 87–88. As an important measure of war finance, Pigou (The Political Economy of War, 2nd ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1941], p. 84) advocates a progressive tax on personal wealth, defined broadly to include durable consumer goods and “the capitalised value of a man’s mental and manual powers.” Mises (Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 166–67) views short-term government borrowing as a preferable alternative to a tax on personal wealth. Pigou also considers borrowing as economically substitutable for a wealth tax, but prefers the latter on grounds of equity, viz., it compels “the rich” to bear a greater proportion of the burdens of war. By the way, Pigou’s statement that “the costs of a war can[not] be paid out of capital.… The source of the funds raised must be the real income of the country” misses the point (Pigou, The Political Economy of War, p. 84, fn. 1). The result of capital consumption induced by the wealth tax is precisely an increase in present real income at the expense of future real income as convertible capital goods and labor are shifted toward the production of present goods.
While the incidence of war taxes falls disproportionately on private saving-investment and wealth, the tax revenues thus appropriated are expended by the belligerent government mainly on present goods in the form of military services and equipment for immediate use. As in the case of an increase in the consumption/saving ratio that would follow from an autonomous increase in the social time preference rate, the “pure” or “real” interest rate that underlies the structure of risk-adjusted loan rates and rates of return on investment is driven up. The higher loan rates and the attendant fall in the market appraisals of debt and equity securities operate to discourage business borrowing and dampen investment in maintaining and reproducing the existing capital structure. The result is a contraction of the demand for capital goods and the sudden onset of “crisis” conditions.
The consequent decline in the prices of capital goods relative to consumer/military goods reflects the greater discount on future vis-a-vis present goods that is revealed in the higher interest rate, and it results in losses for firms in the higher stages of the production structure. In the aggregate, the losses of firms producing capital goods exceed the profits gained by the firms favored by the enhanced military expenditures. The appearance of aggregate losses in the capitalconsuming or retrogressing economy is ultimately attributable to the fact that labor productivity and real income is declining as resources are bid away from capital goods production by the increased military expenditures. These transitional, though highly visible, losses suffered by business firms are the first step in the process of imputing the decline of marginal productivities attendant upon the dissipation of the capital stock back to the incomes of labor and natural resources.On this process of imputation see Rothbard (Man, Economy, and State, vol. 2, pp. 483–84) and Mises (Human Action, pp. 294–300).
The capital-decumulation crisis is also manifested in a crash of the the stock market, because, as noted above, stocks represent titles to pro rata shares of ownership in existing complements of capital goods known as “business firms.” It is precisely the values of the prospective future outputs of a firm’s productive assets, particularly its fixed capital goods, that are suddenly more heavily discounted in appraising the capital value of the firm. This is especially true of firms that are themselves producing durable capital goods or inputs into these goods. The overall decline in the market’s estimation of the capitalized value of various business assets that is indicated by the fall in value of equity and debt securities, of course, not only reflects current business losses but is precisely how monetary calculation reveals the fact of capital decumulation. A drop in real estate markets would also occur at the inception of a tax-financed transition to a war economy, because industrial and commercial construction and land represent particularly durable resources whose capital values are therefore extremely sensitive to a higher rate of discount on future goods. Even if such capital goods may be converted to current military production, their values would still have to be written down to reflect the waste of capital involved in their construction. In other words, if the exigencies of war had been anticipated, labor and other nonspecific resources would not have been “locked up” in them for such lengthy periods of time.As Mises (Human Action, p. 503) notes, some capital goods “… can be employed for the new process without any alteration; but if it had been known at the time they were produced that they would be used in the new way, it would have been possible to manufacture at smaller cost other goods which could render the same service.”
Similar to business cycle crises, war mobilization crises will also feature certain secondary, although highly visible, financial and monetary aspects. Many highly leveraged firms in higher-stage industries, confronted by slumping output prices, will attempt to fend off the prospect of defaulting on their debts by undertaking a “scramble for liquidity,” which drives up short-term interest rates, raises the demand for money, and sharply lowers the prices of commodities that are dumped on the market for quick cash. This will precipitate a general fall in prices, which will intensify and extend the liquidity scramble. Actual and threatened defaults on bank loans and other securities also will begin to erode confidence in the soundness of the financial system. Even if the fractional-reserve banking system bears up under the strain, sparing the economy a collapse of the money supply and a “secondary depression,” the conspicuous bankruptcies of banks and business firms, reinforced by the sharp decline in private financial wealth and after-tax incomes, will quickly disabuse the populace of any notion that war breeds prosperity.
The government will be unable to avoid, and may even exacerbate, the mobilization crisis by substituting borrowing for higher tax levies. The reason is that, in contrast to taxes, which must be paid out of present income and monetary assets and therefore reduce both private consumption and saving (in accordance with taxpayers’ time preferences), government borrowing directly taps saving. When selling securities, the government competes with business for the public’s saved funds, and, because it is capable of bidding up the interest rate that it is willing to pay practically without limit, it is in the position to obtain all the funds it needs. As RothbardRothbard, Man, Economy, and State, p. 881. concludes “Public borrowing strikes at individual savings more effectively even than taxation, for it specifically lures away savings rather than taxing income in general.” With a qualification to be mentioned shortly, by thus “crowding out” private investment to acquire the funds for war financing, government borrowing insures that the entire burden of adjustment to a war economy is borne solely by the capital goods industries. The adjustment is now exclusively vertical, because consumption is not diminished, obviating any horizontal reallocation of resources. MisesMises, Human Action, p. 850. thus compares government borrowing to a kind of tax on accumulated capital in its devastating effect on the capital structure: “If current expenditure, however beneficial it may be considered, is financed by taking away by inheritance taxes those parts of higher incomes which would have been employed for investment, or by borrowing, the government becomes a factor making for capital consumption.”For an analysis of the inheritance tax as a pure tax on capital, see Rothbard, Power and Market, pp. 84–85.
Because it brings about greater capital consumption than tax financing does, government borrowing promotes a more severe crisis. Thus, for example, on the eve of the outbreak of World War I, between July 23 and July 31, and before the would-be belligerent States had “gone off” the gold standard and began inflating their respective national money supplies, panic selling forced the closing of all major stock exchanges from St. Petersburg and Vienna to Toronto and New York. Certainly, this broad decline in the market value of stocks was partially attributable to general uncertainty of the future and an increased demand for liquidity.B.M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914–1946 (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, [1949] 1979), pp. 28–29. But it also represented a response to expectations of heavy government borrowing to finance war mobilization under the non-inflationary conditions of the gold standard.
The British economist Ralph G. HawtreyR.G. Hawtrey, Currency and Credit (New York: Arno Press, [1919] 1979), pp. 210–11. aptly described the initial stages of this mobilization crisis and the frantic attempts of government to suppress it by swift resort to legal debt moratoria and bank credit inflation:
The prospect of forced borrowing by the Government on a large scale will stifle the demand for existing stock exchange securities, and stock exchange operators and underwriters will find themselves loaded up with securities which are saleable, if at all, only at a great sacrifice. The disorganisation of business may be so great that an almost universal bankruptcy can only be staved off by special measures for suspending the obligations of debtors, like the crop of moratorium statutes with which Europe blossomed out in 1914.
A Government, indeed, faced with a great war, cannot afford to let half the business of the country slip into bankruptcy, and … the embarrassed traders are propped up, either by lavish advances granted them by arrangement, or by a special statutory moratorium.Michael A. Heilperin, the Misesian international monetary theorist, in his study of post-World War One inflations, also hints at a link between deficit financing and the war mobilization crisis, writing that “Deficit financing was closely connected with the course of development of monetary circulation. The outbreak of the war resulted not only in a need for deficit financing but also in widespread movements of panic on the part of the public. In order to prevent the panic from undermining the internal monetary conditions and thereby adversely affecting the war effort, moratoria on banks were declared almost immediately… Also the gold standard was suspended. Curiously, Heilperin’s valuable study, carried out in 1943–44 under the auspices of the National Bureau of Economic Research and “circulated to a large body of leading American experts of the day,” was never published by the NBER. In fact, when the NBER agreed to allow the copyright to revert back to Heilperin so that he could include the article in a book of his essays (published in 1968), the institute stipulated that it wished to remain unnamed in his acknowledgement (Heilperin, “Post-War European Inflations, World War I: A Study of Selected Cases,” in idem, Aspects of the Pathology of Money: Monetary Essays from Four Decades [London: Michael Joseph Limited, 1968], p. 97). I possess a copy of the article in original mimeographed form and the cover page is marked “Preliminary and Confidential” and bears the imprint of the “National Bureau of Economic Research, Financial Research Bureau.”
As noted, there is an important qualification to our conclusion that the substitution of government borrowing for taxation will exacerbate the mobilization crisis. Even if the monetary costs of war are paid for entirely by borrowing, the resulting adjustment of the real economy will not be entirely vertical, because the supply of savings is more or less “elastic” or sensitive with respect to changes in the interest rate.
Consequently, as the government’s fiscal agent bids up interest rates, some members of the public will be induced to voluntarily reduce their present consumption to a greater or lesser extent, in order to take advantage of the increased premium in terms of the enhanced future consumption per dollar of foregone present consumption promised by the higher-yielding securities. In fact, if the public’s structure of time preferences makes them sufficiently sensitive to rising interest rates in determining their consumption/saving ratio, consumer-good industries may conceivably come to bear a larger burden of adjustment than they would under tax financing.
In any case, we conclude that, when undistorted by monetary inflation, regardless of the fiscal technique or combination of techniques employed, economic calculation clearly and immediately reveals to market participants, individually and in the aggregate, the enormous destruction of real wealth and decline in real income entailed in mobilizing for a large-scale war. What insures this result is monetary calculation based on genuine market prices. Indeed, as MisesMises, Human Action, p. 261. points out, “The market economy is real because it can calculate.… Among the main tasks of economic calculation are those of establishing the magnitudes of income, saving, and capital consumption.”
Individual capital goods, even so-called fixed capital equipment, wear out in production and, in a world of unceasing change, must be replaced by physically different goods. The capital structure is thus undergoing a physical transformation at every instant of time. This means that capitalist-entrepreneurs, who must continually adjust the production processes under their control to changing consumer preferences, technical innovations, and resource availabilities, must have recourse to a common denominator in order to determine the outcome of their past production decisions and to assess the resulting quantity of productive resources they currently can dispose of as a starting point for future decisions.
In other words, only the market’s pricing process provides the meaningful cardinal numbers needed by entrepreneurs to calculate their costs, revenues, profits, and quantity of capital. Given the continual change in market conditions that impels constant adjustment of the real capital structure and given the vast physical heterogeneity of the complementary capital goods that constitute this structure, in the absence of monetary calculation utilizing genuine market prices, it becomes impossible for a producer not only to quantitatively appraise his capital and income, but to meaningfully conceive a distinction between them. Thus, without the guidance of capital accounting, there would be no telling how much of the gross receipts from his business the entrepreneur could allocate to his present consumption without dissipating his capital and therefore his ability to provide for future wants.As Mises (Human Action, pp. 210–11) writes, “Economic calculation is either an estimate of the expected outcome of future action or the establishment of the outcome of past action. But the latter does not serve merely historical and didactic aims. Its practical meaning is to show how much one is free to consume without impairing the future capacity to produce. It is with regard to this problem that the fundamental notions of economic calculation—capital and income, profit and loss, spending and saving, cost and yield—are developed.” Also see ibid., pp. 230, 260–62, 491, and 514–17.
As we have learned from the socialist calculation debate, in the absence of monetary calculation using genuine market prices, rational allocation of resources is impossible. By proscribing private property in the so-called “means of production,” socialist central planning effectively eradicates markets and prices for capital goods, thereby bringing about the abolition of monetary calculation and the inevitable destruction of the existing capital structure.For recent views of the socialist calculation debate that emphasize Mises’s original thesis that socialism is “impossible” precisely because it lacks the means of economic calculation, see Joseph T. Salerno, “Ludwig von Mises as Social Rationalist,” The Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 4: pp. 26–54; idem, “Why a Socialist Economy Is ‘Impossible’,” Postscript to Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, trans. S. Adler (Auburn, Ala.: Praxeology Press, 1990), pp. 51–71; idem, Reply to Leland B. Yeager on “Mises and Hayek on Calculation and Knowledge,” The Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 6, no. 2: pp. 111–25 and Murray N. Rothbard, “ The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited,” The Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 5, no. 2: pp. 51–76. While the effects of monetary inflation on economic calculation are not as manifestly devastating as outright socialization—at least initially—it, nonetheless, operates insidiously to falsify profit and capital calculations. One of the main reasons why inflation distorts monetary calculation is because accounting must assume a stability of the value of money which does not exist in reality. Nonetheless, where fluctuations in the purchasing power of money are minor, as is the case with market-based commodity moneys represented historically especially by the gold standard, this assumption does not practically affect entrepreneurs’ monetary calculations and appraisements. A mighty and complex structure of capital goods was built up under the nineteenth-century gold standard using precisely such methods of calculation.
However, when government operating through a central bank deliberately orchestrates significant fiat money inflation to pay for a war or for any other purpose, matters are much different. The resulting large decrease in the purchasing power of money, to the extent that it is not recognized and immediately adapted to in accounting procedures, will inescapably falsify business calculations. Moreover, prices in general do not adjust instantaneously upward in response to the increase in the money supply; rather, the fall in the overall purchasing power of money is the final outcome of a time-consuming, sequential adjustment process involving a distortion of relative prices, including the interest rate, i.e., or the price ratio between present and future goods.On the long-run non-neutrality of the monetary adjustment process, see Mises, Theory of Money and Credit, pp. 160–68 and Joseph T. Salerno, “Ludwig von Mises on Inflation and Expectations,” Advances in Austrian Economics, vol. 2: pp. 297–325 [reprinted here as Chapter 8]. Both of these effects operate to conceal the process of capital consumption during its early stages.
Under modern conditions, inflationary financing of war involves a government “monetizing” its debt by selling securities, directly or indirectly, to the central bank. The funds thus obtained are then spent on the items necessary to equip and sustain the armed forces of the nation. The result is a sudden expansion of demand for the products of the military and consumer-good industries, with no reduction in the monetary demand for the products of the capital-good industries. A boom is consequently precipitated, featuring rising prices, profits, and stock values in the former industries; The boom is particularly intense and dazzling in these industries because, during an inflation, prices rise in temporal sequence. Thus, prices and nominal incomes initially increase only for those sellers who receive the new money in the first round of spending and, therefore, before the prices of the productive inputs and consumer goods they themselves regularly purchase have had a chance to rise. As MisesMises, Nation, State and Economy, p. 158. concludes, “The war suppliers … have therefore gained not only from enjoying good business in the ordinary sense of the word but also from the fact that the additional quantity of money flowed first to them. The price rise of the goods and services that they brought to market was a double one, it was caused first by the increased demand for their labor, but then too by the increased supply of money.”
Because the increase in the demand for credit represented by the Treasury’s issuance of securities is met by newly-created bank credit, on the one hand, market interest rates do not initially rise. On the other hand, the higher prices for consumer and war goods eventually spread up the ladder of the structure of production and result in higher prices for the capital-good inputs produced by the higher-stage firms. As HeilperinHeilperin, “Post-War European Inflations,” p. 105. states in reference to World War I inflations, “The wave of rising prices tends to generate profits for anyone who holds inventories of goods and increases existing profits for producers. Higher current profits, in turn, induce a reappraisal by the market of future profit prospects which, when discounted by the unchanged interest rate, results in a rise in the equity values of capital-good firms also. War appears to breed universal prosperity.”
Nonetheless, capital consumption is proceeding apace, with aggregate real losses being suffered especially by higher-order firms. The reason why these firms do not discern their losses and progressive decapitalization is because of their accounting practices, which served them so well during the prewar period of roughly stable prices. Thus, despite the depreciating monetary unit, they continue to carry their fixed capital equipment on their books at historical cost, calculating their depreciation quotas accordingly. Even though some of their costs, especially wage rates, are continually driven up by the inflation-fueled bidding of the producers of military and selected consumer goods, capital-good firms, nevertheless, appear to be earning profits as their output prices continue ever upward with a lag.
It is only when it comes to replacing their plant and machinery—possibly years down the road—at the much higher “replacement cost” reflecting monetary depreciation that their decline in capital will at last become evident. Moreover, in many cases, the entrepreneurs will then discover that they themselves inadvertently exacerbated this capital consumption by spending their illusory pecuniary profits, which were actually part of their depreciation quotas, on high living and other forms of present consumption.
The Austrian economist, Fritz MachlupF. Machlup, “The Consumption of Capital in Austria,” The Review of Economic Statistics (January): pp. 13–19. illustrates this process of capital consumption for working capital with a striking example drawn from the Austrian inflation initiated during the First World War:
A dealer bought a thousand tons of copper. He sold them, as prices rose, with considerable profit. He consumed only half of the profit and saved the other half. He invested again in copper and got several hundred tons. Prices rose and rose. The dealer’s profit was enormous; he could afford to travel and to buy cars, country houses, and what not. He also saved and invested again in copper. His money capital was now a high multiple of his initial one. After repeated transactions—he always could afford to live a luxurious life—he invested his whole capital, grown to an astronomical amount, in a few pounds of copper. While he and the public considered him a profiteer of the highest income, he had in reality eaten up his capital.
- War Inflation and The Road to Economic Fascism Even after the monetary inflation manifests itself in a general rise in prices, the public can still be misled into believing that these price increases are the result of temporary shortages of essential materials or the machinations of unscrupulous war profiteers and price-gougers. It is only a matter of time, however, before workers and investors outside the military-industrial complex come to recognize that a depreciating monetary unit is a permanent feature of the war economy and their eroding real wages and illusory profits are brought clearly and painfully into focus. To postpone the day of accurate reckoning of the costs of war yet again, the government implements price controls. As a result of the inevitable shortages and inefficiencies generated by price controls, the government frantically institutes and then rapidly expands controls over production, distribution, and labor, until very little is left of the market economy and its capital structure. The final outcome of this process is an economy in which, although productive resources are still nominally privately owned, the State has effectively arrogated to itself the power to make all crucial production decisions. The all-encompassing war economy is, ultimately and inescapably, a fascist economy.As Charlotte Twight, America’s Emerging Fascist Economy (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House Publishers, 1975), pp. 16–17 perceptively argues, “Fascism is unique among collectivist systems in selecting capitalism as its nominal economic mate, but capitalism is turned inside out in this unlikely union.… [F]ascism tolerates the form of private ownership at the government’s pleasure, but it eliminates any meaningful right of private property. Fascist capitalism is ’regulated’ capitalism; it is government intervention in the economy on a massive scale. Avraham Barkai (Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy, trans. Ruth Hadass-Vashitz [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990], p. 248) characterizes the Nazi economy in similar terms: “The market still existed but was not a free market, and most decisions taken by the owners of enterprise were not ‘free’ either. The term ‘organized capitalism’ suits this economic method, subject only to the reservation that organization was imposed from above by extraeconomic, that is, political factors; it was these factors that were responsible for directing the economy in accordance with basically non-economic considerations. It was therefore a capitalist economy in which capitalists, like all other citizens, were not free even though they enjoyed a privileged status, had a limited measure of freedom in their activities, and were able to accumulate huge profits as long as they accepted the primacy of politics.”
Guenter ReimanG. Reimann, The Vampire Economy: Doing Business under Fascism (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1939). has fittingly entitled his book on the fascist economic system of Nazi Germany, The Vampire Economy, because, as a permanent war economy, it systematically and madly consumes the capital, the very lifeblood, of the host capitalist economy. And to enforce the compliance of its citizens in this painfully self-destructive course, an all-powerful state is indispensable. As ReimanIbid., p. xi. puts it: “[I]t is impossible to foretell when a military system will collapse as a result of a deficiency in foodstuffs, raw materials or other economic factors. As long as the state machine is in order, it has the power to cut down the consumption of the general public and to reduce— almost to eliminate—expenditures for the renewal of the industrial machine.… It is possible to increase production of arms and ammunition even with reduced supplies of raw materials. This can be done by drastically limiting production of consumption goods, by putting the population on starvation rations, and by letting vast sectors of the economy decay.” In Germany, for example, despite the fact that total production had increased from prewar levels as a result of the plundering of the productive wealth of vanquished nations and the relocation and forced labor of conquered peoples, by 1944 the output of the vital construction industries had shrunk to 25 percent of its prewar level while consumer goods output had declined by only 15 percent.Barkai, Nazi Economics, p. 238. The capital consumption that inflation brings about surreptitiously in the beginning, a repressive fascist State is required to sustain over the long run in the service of the war effort.
The American journalist, John T. Flynn,J.T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc., 1944), p. 165. wrote that “A bad fascism is a fascist regime which is against us in the war. A good fascist regime is one that is on our side.” But, to repeat, all war economies are and must be in the end fascist economies. HiggsHiggs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 234–35. vividly characterizes the process by which, in an effort to conceal the costs of World War II from its citizens, the U.S. government was driven by the iron logic of economic theory to blunder into draconian fascist economic planning:
Huge military and naval forces required correspondingly large amounts of equipment, supplies, subsistence, and transportation. When the government’s procurement officers, their pockets bulging with newly created purchasing power, set in motion a bidding war that could have driven prices up to spectacular levels, thereby revealing the full costs of the government’s program and provoking political reaction and resistance, the government moved to conceal the costs by price controls.… But price controls on goods and services could not be effectively enforced while wages remained free to rise. Hence controls of labor compensation followed in due course. The market economy, a vast and delicately interdependent system of transactions, invariably surprised and confounded the administrators of partial controls. In response the government progressively expanded and tightened the command system until, during the final two years of the war, a thoroughgoing garrison economy had been brought into operation. Fundamentally the authorities, not the market, determined what, how, and for whom the economy would produce under this regime.
We conclude, then, that monetary inflation is the crucial first step in the process by which government seeks to conceal from its citizen-subjects the enormous costs associated with war, particularly the progressive destruction of the nation’s productive wealth. Specifically, the inflationary process is indispensable for masking the capital decumulation crisis precipitated by war mobilization, which would otherwise be swiftly revealed to one and all by monetary calculation. In the absence of the veil cast over real economic processes by inflation, the public’s enthusiasm for the alleged glories of war would be rapidly and significantly dampened by skyrocketing interest rates, plummeting stock and bond markets, and pandemic business bankruptcies and bank runs—not to mention the levying of confiscatory kinds and levels of taxation. Ironically, it is not money itself that is a “veil”—as classical economists used to claim and many contemporary quantity theorists still affirm—because it is precisely monetary calculation that permits market participants to meaningfully assess their wealth and income and appraise the outcomes of alternative allocations of resources. Rather it is central bank manipulation of the money supply that falsifies the calculation of economic quantities and distorts the insight of the citizenry into the true economic sacrifices that they are making for the cause.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the characterization of monetary inflation as a means for obscuring the real costs of war is an inference from strictly value-free economic theory and, as such, does not logically imply the value judgment that war ought to be financed by noninflationary fiscal methods. How a war should be financed and whether it should even be waged are equally questions that can only be resolved in light of a politico-ethical theory. Of course, this is not to deny that such a theory should be “consequentialist” in a broad sense and take into account in its formulation the positive conclusions of economics as well as of all other relevant sciences regarding the outcomes of various government policies. Indeed, given the conclusions of Austrian economic theory that the very concept of a “public good” is untenable and that national defense can and will, be supplied most efficiently by the market, like any other desired good, the road has been cleared for the construction of a politico-ethical argument that defense of person and property from local criminals as well as from foreign invaders should be left to the free market.For Austrian critiques of the concept of a public good, see, for example, Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, vol. 2, pp. 883–90 and H.H. Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics and Ethics (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 187–210. For the classic article defending the competitive production of defense services by private enterprise, originally penned in 1848 by a leading economist of the French liberal school, see Gustave de Molinari, The Production of Security, trans. J. Huston McCulloch (New York: The Center for Libertarian Studies, 1977). For more recent expositions of how the free market would work to provide defense and other public goods, see Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (Lansing, Mich.: Morris and Linda Tannehill, 1970), pp. 107; Rothbard, Power and Market, pp. 1–7; M.N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 2nd ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1978), pp. 215–41; J.R. Hummel, “National Goods Versus Public Goods: Defense, Disarmament and Free Riders,” The Review of Austrian Economics, pp. 88–122; and J.R. Hummel and D. Lavoie, “National Defense and the Public-Goods Problem,” Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 5, nos. 2/3 (June/September): pp. 353–77.
There is no reason to expect the Afghanistan debacle to humble Washington policymakers. Korean War fiascos were swept under the rug, paving the way for the Vietnam War. The cycle didn't end there.
Original Article: "Kabul's Collapse and DC's Incurable Arrogance"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Jeff Deist hosts a solo show to discuss one of his favorite novels from childhood, All Quiet on the Western Front. Its young protagonist Paul Bäumer, barely out of adolescence, narrates the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective only a grunt soldier can provide. Bäumer and his mates lose their innocence, along with various limbs and often their lives. But what makes the book so compelling is not simply the description of wartime savagery, but the dialogue between the men: stripped of any illusions, they see the futility of killing and maiming simply to capture a few more feet of no-man's land. The dialogue in Chapter 9 between the men, arguing about whether states or "people" go to war, is masterful. This is a book every passionate antiwar advocate needs to read time and again.
All Quiet on the Western Front on Amazon: Mises.org/AllQuiet Jeff Deist's review of They Shall not Grow Old: Mises.org/ShallNot
Private security tends to provide its services to the highest bidder. And you know that almost always ends up being the regime itself. Corn farmers just can’t cut the same kinds of checks that tax farmers can.
Original Article: "Private Security Isn't Enough: Why America Needs Militias"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The difficulty Trump encountered in trying to even slightly scale back American military schemes shows just how far Americans are from abandoning the idea that the United States is the indispensable nation entitled to fight wars always and everywhere.
Original Article: "America Still Loves the Warfare State"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
In response to a listener request, Bob starts a 3-part series explaining areas where his views have changed. In this episode, he covers trade deficits, justice vs. mercy, the 2000 election, WMDs in Iraq, and Arrow’s Theorem.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: Bob’s article on why free traders should be more careful when defending trade deficitsBob’s article explaining the capital account in reference to trade deficits, in the context of criticizing Peter Schiff. Then Bob’s mea culpaBob’s article on Robert MundellBMS episode explaining Arrow’s TheoremSteve Landsburg’s The Armchair EconomistBob’s link for Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom (which features a lecture on Arrow’s Theorem) For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Now that the average American voter is barely paying attention—and that the US is facing an economic crisis and weak recovery—it has become politically expedient to move further toward wrapping up a couple more lost wars.
Original Article: "The United States Has Declared Defeat in Two More Wars"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Scott Horton comes back on the show to discuss his new book, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism. He and Bob largely focus on Osama Bin Laden's strategy for drawing the U.S. into unwinnable wars. They also discuss the role of Israel in U.S. foreign policy.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: The YouTube version of this interviewScott’s new book Enough Already: Time to End the War on TerrorismThe archive of interviews at The Scott Horton ShowThe homepage of the Libertarian Institute For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Ryan McMaken joins the show for a lengthy discussion of Rothbard's brief but devastating essay Anatomy of the State. This book demands that readers understand the stark nature of government, without fairy tales or niceties. It applies the same lens to public and private criminality. It challenges every myth surrounding politics and statecraft, ranging from "the government is us" to judicial review. It explains how the state maintains legitimacy, how it expands, how it deals with other states, and ultimately how it works to prevent domestic threats to its power. And it still serves as the baseline analysis for understanding state power, nearly 50 years after Rothbard helped create a burgeoning anarcho-capitalist movement. Anatomy of the State is a book that everyone, from anarchist to statist, needs to read and consider.
Read Rothbard's Anatomy of the State at Mises.org/AnatomyBook
The reliability and service life of the F-35 were greatly exaggerated in earlier reports. Now the aircraft is looking like an even bigger boondoggle than before.
Original Article: "Opposition Builds to the F-35 Program's Runaway Costs"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Nuland was an advisor to ultrainterventionist Dick Cheney and would continue the costly expansionist policies of the Bush and Obama years.
Original Article: "With Victoria Nuland Nomination, Biden Signals a Return to Bush-Obama-Era Foreign Policy"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Pulling troops out of South Korea is an important step in changing the conversation on American foreign policy, which is swamped in platitudes of promoting missionary enterprises abroad and finding new bogeymen to confront.
Original Article: "It's Time for the US to Withdraw from Korea"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The threat of “nuclear proliferation” remains one of the great catch-all reasons—the other being “humanitarian” intervention—given for why the US regime and its allies ought to be given unlimited power to invade foreign states and impose sanctions at any given time.
Original Article: ""Weapons of Mass Destruction": The Last Refuge of the Global Interventionist"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
How did the federal government acquire this omnipotent power? Certainly not by constitutional amendment. It acquired it by converting the federal government after World War II from a limited-government republic to a national security state.
Original Article: "The Omnipotent Power to Assassinate"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The claim that the US needs an immense and varied nuclear arsenal "does serve one purpose: it keeps military budgets wondrously high."
Original Article: "Why No State Needs Thousands of Nuclear Warheads"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
After decades of financialization and government favors, Wall Street now has little to do with free, functioning markets anymore and has largely become an adjunct of the central bank. Today, entrepreneurship is out, and bailouts are in.
Additional Resources "Financialization: Why the Financial Sector Now Rules the Global Economy" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_52_Article
"Monetary Policy and Inequality" Karl-Friedrich Israel: Mises.org/RR_52_Video
"Speaking Truth to Monetary Power" by Lew Rockwell: Mises.org/RR_52_Article2
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
The Biden administration has threatened to intervene in Burma to defend "democracy" which really just means putting back into power a woman who is known to support ethnic cleansing. But she said nice things about "democracy," so she'll get the US's nod.
Original Article: "The Burmese Mess Demonstrates the Incoherence of America's Crusades for Democracy"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
We're supposed to believe that with Trump gone, political discourse will now be more honest and accurate. The reality is the Washington establishment is built on lies and myths and conspiracy theories. Here are just a few of them, from Russiagate to government spending.
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop discuss some of the new policies the Biden administration wants to inflict on us, on topics ranging from Bitcoin to foreign policy.
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
Scott Horton of antiwar.com and the Libertarian Institute has a new book chronicling 20 years of America's "War on Terror." Enough Already is a compelling history of modern US interventionism and a scathing critique of American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Horton joins Jeff Deist for a sobering look at American hubris overseas, along with the blowback and destruction it causes. You don't want to miss this conversation.
It’s hard to be optimistic about a Biden administration with so many hyperinterventionist Obama retreads. Get ready for new wars and "regime change" operations.
Original Article: "The Unwelcome Return of the Real Purveyors of Violence"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
The power to incinerate a billion or more human beings over morning coffee remains in the power of the president. This morning Biden supporters on Twitter were ecstatic over the video of the nuclear launch equipment being handed over to Biden.
Original Article: "Biden Can Now Launch the Nukes and Unleash World War III Whenever He Feels Like It"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Foreign policy apparatchiks are adept at gaslighting the public into believing they’re bringing troops back home when in reality they’re either shifting troops around or just biding their time until a new round of "boots on the ground."
Original Article: "Beware the Troop-Withdrawal Bait and Switch"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Many observers of international affairs assume that larger, more populous states are necessarily more powerful. But the reality is wealth and economic development are the most critical factors in securing true military power.
Original Article: "When It Comes to National Defense, Bigger Isn't Always Better"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Coups are nearly always acts committed by elites against the sitting executive power using the tools of the elites. It's clear the elites want Trump gone, and Wednesday's riot was no coup.
Original Article: "The Capitol Riot Wasn’t a Coup. It Wasn't Even Close."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
There's no reason to assume 2021 will bring a reversal of 2020's trends. Many of the fights that began in 2020 are likely to intensify in the new year.
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
MacMillan's book provides many insights into the true vileness of war, although she strays into some dangerous areas when she accepts the faulty economic notion that wars bring economic benefits through government spending.
Original Article: "New Perspectives on the Evils of War".
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
In this outstanding study, Stephen Wertheim shows that both views that dominate American foreign policy are wrong. In doing so, he vindicates for our time the merits of a noninterventionist foreign policy.
Original Article: "The Myth of America as a 'Reluctant Superpower'".
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
All of a sudden the tweets are gone, the Facebook is gone, the media is gone. Only crazy people are questioning the most pristine — the most perfect — election of all time.
Presented at the Symposium with Ron Paul on Saturday, 7 November 2020, in Angleton, Texas.
A panel featuring Jeff Deist, Daniel McAdams, and Tom Woods.
Presented at the Symposium with Ron Paul on Saturday, 7 November 2020, in Angleton, Texas.
The Democrats, Liz Cheney, and the Never Trumpers still want endless wars, and they hate Trump's apparent lack of enthusiasm for embracing their dreams of empire.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Original Article: "On Foreign Policy, Trump Is Still the Lesser Evil".
GMU economics professor Chris Coyne explains how US militarism abroad ends up violating civil liberties on the home front. They also discuss the contributions of James Buchanan that should interest Austrian economists.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: The YouTube version of this interviewChris Coyne’s webpage and his book Tyranny Comes HomeThe LSE essays on cost (edited by Buchanan)Tom DiLorenzo article on Public ChoiceRothbard’s essay on reconstructing utility and welfare economics, his reply to Schuller on praxeology, and his essay on Progressivism and WW1.Bob’s booklet on market anarchy and essay on private defense.Bob Murphy Show ep. 102 on the Grievance Studies hoax For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is not worthy of a massive investment by the taxpayer—especially since the program doesn't make Americans any safer.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Original Article: "The Trillion-Dollar F-35 Fighter Program Does Not Make Americans Safer".
Many of the "solutions" peddled by today's experts are more likely to increase wealth inequality than decrease it.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "What "Experts" Miss about Economic Inequality".
The embargo continues, partly because the Cuba situation has indirectly exposed the corrupt sham of the entire Cold War and the corrupt machinery of the US national security establishment.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Trump Continues the Never-Ending War on Cuba".
Former Military Intelligence Sergeant Donnie Gebert returns to the show, this time to explain some of the major elements of his new book, The Art of War 2020. Gebert draws on his eclectic background to give techniques for navigating the modern world.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: The YouTube version of this episodeDonnie Gebert’s The Art of War, 2020 (pdf)Donnie’s original appearance on BMS ep 42Daily Show bit on Ron PaulSNL bit poking fun at Ross Perot For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
The fact that Yalta can now clearly be seen to have been a betrayal is another reason to be wary when pundits and talk show hosts jump on the bandwagon for the next killing spree abroad.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Roosevelt’s Fraud at Yalta and the Mirage of the 'Good War'".
Whether we're commanded to trust the experts, abandon the rule of law, or venerate government for "keeping us safe," the 9/11 panic and our current crisis have many things in common.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "From 9/11 to Covid-19: Nineteen Years of Permanent 'Emergency'".
The US foreign policy establishment has for decades been dominated by neoconservative interventionists and falsely named “humanitarian” interventionists.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Pompeo’s Iran Failures Make War More Likely"
America's unipolar moment is over, and it's time to exercise restraint rather than indulge in endless fantasies about regime change and American-led "global democracy."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "It's Time for a Geopolitical Reset"
Tom DiLorenzo is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute who has written several books critical of Lincoln. His latest is "The Problem With Lincoln." Bob asks Tom about his early career in economics, and then they discuss the various ways in which Abe Lincoln was actually a horrible president.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: The YouTube version of this interview.Tom DiLorenzo’s books The Problem With Lincoln and The Real Lincoln, and with Jim Bennett The Food and Drink Police. #CommissionsEarned (As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)BMS ep. 71 with Mark Thornton, and ep. 81 with Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, both on the economics of slavery.Tom’s 1982 article (with Jim Bennett) in the American Economic Review.Rothbard on “just war” theory. For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
For the foreseeable future, war between Armenia and Azerbaijan will be on the table, occasionally turning hot, just as it has in the last weeks. This conflict has no peaceful solution possible other than the one offered by Ludwig von Mises.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Political Self-Determination and the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict".
The economic nationalist faces a dilemma. Foreign aid handouts and economic protectionism are not only wholly compatible in theory, but the effects of foreign aid perfectly complement economic nationalists’ goals.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Foreign Aid Is Protectionism".
There are at least four good reasons for removing Wilson’s name from Princeton buildings—racial bigotry, his embroiling the US in World War I, his founding of the Fed, and his enactment of the US income tax.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Other Reasons to Remove Wilson’s Name at Princeton".
The Democrats want trillions spent on infrastructure for a "Green New Deal." The GOP wants a trillion for roads and bridges. They're likely to find a way to "work together" to spend trillions either way.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Beware Washington's Latest Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Scheme".
Who has the best claim to government property?
Narrated by Daniella Bassi.
Original Article: "Seattle's CHAZ: Homesteaders or Illegal Squatters?".
George W. Bush has resurfaced to pander to the Left and the media in hopes of getting some attention. Apparently, Bush's brutal history of lies, wars, and torture is all fine now since he said some nice things condemning racism.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "The Media Has Conveniently Forgotten George W. Bush's Many Atrocities".
The United States has been trying to provoke China into a conflict for years. But Americans benefit far more from peace with China. We shouldn't fall for the state's latest hate campaign against foreigners.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "War for Hong Kong?"
Propaganda kills, but it also works. Many of the same tactics employed to destroy opposition to the Iraq War are being used today against opponents of lockdowns.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Coronavirus Propaganda Mimics War Propaganda"
We continue our survey of Human Action by finishing up Part Six of the book, Mises's analysis of interventionism—or the so-called "third way" between capitalism and socialism.
Mises exposes how state intervention in the market economy makes us all poorer, even while it claims to act against poverty and inequality on behalf of social justice. That perverse "justice" takes the form of currency manipulation, confiscation of land and capital, protectionism for syndicates and unions, and civilization-destroying total wars. This is a solo episode with Jeff Deist, who enjoys Mises's demolition of the hampered market economy masquerading as laissez-faire capitalism.
Use the code HAPOD for a discount on Human Action from our bookstore: Mises.org/BuyHA.
Additional Resources Human Action: Mises.org/HumanAction
Bob Murphy's Study Guide to Human Action: Mises.org/Study
Regardless of government actions, many consumers, workers, and producers may seek changes that reduce exposure to disease in the workplace. The best way to do this is through markets.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "How Markets Price a Pandemic—and How They Lower Risk"
What is the number of deaths due to disease which justifies the total abandonment of the rule of law and basic human freedoms? Sixty thousand? One hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? Supporters of the current police state ought to pin down a number for us at which all rights are forfeit.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Exactly How Many Deaths Are Needed to Justify Giving Governments Control of Everything?"
Tareq Haddad was a (recently hired) reporter for Newsweek who was repeatedly rebuffed when trying to cover the emerging story of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report on Syria. He eventually resigned. Tareq discusses how US authorities pressured the OPCW to change the report to fit their desired narrative, and how powerful groups control the corporate media.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Bob Murphy gives a pragmatic case for pacifism, appealing to Christians who would like to take "The Sermon on the Mount" literally, but are worried it would spell disaster.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel joins Bob Murphy for an in-depth discussion of the economics of slavery, touching on subtleties such as the labor/leisure trade-off, and the recent claims by some historians that slavery was efficient. Bob also asks Hummel to explain the provocative claim in his book, that the Confederacy would have done much better militarily if it had used the same guerrilla warfare tactics that the American colonists had used against the British.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Recorded on November 9, 2019, in Lake Jackson, Texas. From the 2019 Ron Paul Symposium, "State Propaganda and the 2020 Election." See all lectures from this event.
Recorded on November 9, 2019, in Lake Jackson, Texas. From the 2019 Ron Paul Symposium, "State Propaganda and the 2020 Election." See all lectures from this event.
The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politicsby Michael MaliceAll Points Books/St. Martin's Press 2019307 pages
Conservatism, Michael Malice famously remarks, is progressivism driving the speed limit. Malice’s latest book, aptly titled The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics, documents a movement of sorts to change this.
Malice is a podcaster, ghostwriter of celebrity books, and author of the truly unique Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jung Il. He is perhaps best known, however, as a highly skilled Twitter provocateur. His vantage point is from the foxholes of social media, but he is not afraid to go out and meet the subjects of his book in the physical world.
A definitive feature of the New Right is its antipathy for Conservatism Inc., the safe, comfortable form of DC Beltway think tankdom and punditry which never seems to conserve anything but its own jobs and funding. If conservatives won’t fight, much less win, they should be replaced by something new. Thus the New Right emerges in the 21st century as a response to the abject failure of conservatives to meaningfully oppose the progressive juggernaut, either ideologically or tactically. Baby Boomer Reagan nostalgia is over and done as a political force, replaced by millennial MAGA guerilla warfare and fully stripped of useless intellectual pretension. Progressivism has its foot on the accelerator, and standing athwart history yelling “slow down” has not worked.
National Review’s departed founder William F. Buckley, Jr., an avatar of this old conservative establishment, is a particular target of the New Right’s ire. Malice finds the CIA-connected Buckley not only grossly hypocritical and disloyal in his purges of dissidents, but also ultimately ineffectual: Buckley embarrassingly failed to conserve even his own son Christopher’s conservatism, the latter cheerfully announcing in 2008 he would vote for Barack Obama. Buckley’s craven search for respectability from the Left yielded nothing, a lesson not lost on Malice and the New Right.
Contrast Buckley with the late Murray Rothbard, treated more favorably in the book. Our readers know Rothbard not only as an architect of modern libertarianism, but also as someone deeply influenced by the “Old Right.” Malice considers Rothbard a Godfather to the modern conservative uprising, at least tangentially, owing to Rothbard’s anti-establishment, anti-egalitarian, and populist views. Yet while the Old Right and the New Right similarly manifest as “diverse and loose coalitions” of groups against the Left, the comparison seems to end there: Rothbard’s stable of influences (Nock, Garrett, Taft) possessed a far more coherent ideology apart from any reactionary opposition.
Still, Malice’s inclusion of Rothbard as a modern influence is welcome. And it raises a question: who today is better known among people under 30, Buckley or Rothbard? My bet is on Rothbard, who is still producing “new” books decades after his death and finding far wider reception for his works in the digital age.
Happily, Malice does not dwell too much on the wildly overhyped “alt-Right,” presenting it only as a subset of his larger topic. The alt-Right is mostly a bogeyman for the Left and Never Trump conservatives, and a phony whipping boy for a credulous mainstream press. It has no institutions, no money, no benefactors or think tanks, and no political power. It consists mostly of a few thousand outsized voices loudly using social media platforms. The alt-Right didn’t elect Donald Trump; a few hundred thousand angry Baby Boomers in a handful of swing states did—many of whom voted for Barack Obama at least once. Malice does not add to alt-Right mythology here.
Since the Right is defined by its reactionary opposition to the Left’s relentless advances, the book by necessity is also about today’s “evangelical” Left. Malice, like the New Right itself, is at his best when skewering the Left’s “Cathedral,” demonstrated by the religious zeal shown for pronouncements and opinions handed down from on high by priests in academia and media:
For the evangelical left, however, the world is defined by what is acceptable, and everything outside this acceptability is wrong and bad. The scales are tipped heavily against anything outside their norms…There are approved parameters, and anything else is simply wrong, as ‘everyone’ (i.e. progressives they associate with and approve of) knows.
Of course those norms and parameters change quickly, often without warning, and thus the Cathedral often savages heretics as readily as conservatives. The Left’s religiosity, complete with canonical texts and ever-narrowing range of faith based opinions, is a key point of Malice’s argument: debate is passé on the Left, if not verboten. The science is settled, and to hell with those outside the faith. Convert or be cast out.
An important article of faith for the Cathedral is democracy, at least the kind that does not elect Trump or approve Brexit. Malice shows particular skill in a chapter attacking democratic pretenses when he considers the case of Barack Obama’s position on capital gains taxes (a position shared by many academic philosophers). In the former president’s view, such taxes are required on grounds of fairness and equality regardless of whether tax revenue actually increases and regardless of whether programs funded by such taxes actually hurt recipients. Outcomes are irrelevant in the Cathedral, and the author pulls no punches explaining why:
There are people who explicitly and genuinely would prefer to see everyone worse off. It is very rare to see a conservative acknowledge the possibility that the left intentionally prefers what’s worse for everyone in service to some higher ideal.
In other words, the Cathedral demands tithes as the price of democracy—and far more than 10%. After all, you voted for it. But what if you did not vote for it, in fact? What if you are not a politician or bureaucrat with your hands on the wheel? Who actually carries out the actions decided upon, and who watches over the administrators? How far does this democratic consensus really go? Malice is ready with an explanation to these questions, channeling Rothbard and de Jouvenel: even in the most direct form of democracy, like a town hall, time and space are limited. Someone must set the agenda. And “an entity that sets the agenda for discussion, recognizes individual speakers, and frames questions for everyone else is an elite. Elitist rule is inevitable.” This is a nice puncturing of democracy and the “consent” argument, and a high point in the book.
If politicians and professors are the Cathedral’s clergy, media figures are its enforcers. Malice identifies one classic techniques as the “demand for disavowal,” something familiar to many of us. This is a version of guilt by association, and varies only in how many degrees of separation from the Deplorables are required to remain in good standing. The book describes one social media figure popular with the new Right who finds himself interviewed by the decidedly analog-era TV show 60 Minutes. His twitter feed and videos apparently attract the “wrong” kind of followers, and he is asked on air to denounce them— not to show decency or a change of heart, but to show conformity. Or, as Malice puts it, to “genuflect before the demands of progressivism.”
The book contains transgressions, of course. An early chapter finds Malice astray in his descriptions of Mises, Austrian economics generally, and Rothbard’s contributions to the field. Mises did not “eschew” economic calculation so much as he made the definitive case against the socialist version of it. He was not overly theoretical or philosophical, contra Malice’s implication, but rather rooted in theory and axioms as the starting point for a deductive process. Praxeology, then, is not the “basis of human activity” as Malice alleges but rather the science of studying human action.
Similarly, Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State was not a rehash of Human Action as per Malice, but rather a significant advancement of Austrian theory in several areas. Rothbard’s references to social utility in his treatise are couched in economic terms. But utilitarianism did not drive Rothbard’s economics, and Malice ignores the construction of a natural law argument for laissez-faire in The Ethics of Liberty. One senses in the book an impulse to portray Rothbard as a radical, which he was, but not as a tremendously accomplished intellectual and seminal thinker, which he surely was as well. Rothbard was neither a misanthrope nor a gadfly, and random quotes from the 1960s to demonstrate intransigence do not serve the author well.
But these transgressions likely stem from Malice’s relatively brief readings of these thinkers, and from his particular focus on Rothbard as a political theorist rather than an economist. Malice is not required to display deep familiarity with either man’s oeuvre before commenting.
There are other nits to pick. Malice seems not to understand Ron Paul, whose campaigns attempted to build a real movement founded on ideological moorings rather than tactical or electoral considerations—more Barry Goldwater than Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot. Malice also refers, several times, to a mythical WASP power structure which has not existed in America for at least 50 years. He spends too much time discussing current New Right personalities, memes, and platforms; these will appear dated in just a few years, limiting the book’s staying power. Whether this was at the behest of his publisher we do not guess. And he seems overly cautious in separating himself from his subjects, making sure the reader knows he is an anarchist rather than a conservative or actual member of the New Right. But surely “everyone knows” even speaking to the wrong people for research purposes, much less commiserating with them as Malice sometimes does, can only result in a demand for disavowal.
If the author considers these criticisms pedantic, in keeping with the spirit of the New Right, we understand. Yet if the rebels hope to survive and supplant Conservatism, Inc., they should take their cues from the Old Right and strive for intellectual cohesion with strong antiwar foundations. In the age of the amoral, relentless Cathedral, tactics and foot soldiers are important. But so are intellectual supply lines.
Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold WarLindsey A. O'RourkeCornell University Press, 2018330 pages
Lindsey O’Rourke has given us a devastating indictment of the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War and after. O’Rourke, who teaches political science at Boston College, is not a principled non-interventionist in the style of Ron Paul. To the contrary, she sympathizes with the “Offensive Realism” of John Mearsheimer, under whom she studied at the University of Chicago. Accordingly, she does not oppose the efforts of states to increase their power over other states but rather regards this as inevitable.
Her argument is that a key element of American foreign policy has failed to achieve its purpose. The United States has often aimed at “regime change,” both overt and covert. The latter type of regime change has been especially unsuccessful, and, to show that this is so, the bulk of the book analyzes in detail a number of instances of covert regime change during the Cold War.
She states her conclusion in this way: “The vast majority of America’s overt and covert regime changes during the Cold War did not work out as their planners intended. Washington launched these regime changes to resolve security-oriented interstate disputes by installing foreign leaders with similar policy preferences. American experiences during the Cold War, however, illustrate that this was often quite difficult in practice. Thirty-nine out of sixty-four covert regime changes failed to replace their targets, and because America’s role in most of these failed attempts generally did not remain a secret, they further soured Washington’s already negative relationship with the target state. Even nominally successful covert operations — where the US backed forces assumed power — failed to deliver on their promise to improve America’s relationship with the target state.”
Readers of Ludwig von Mises will at once recall this pattern of argument. Just as Mises argues that economic interventions such as minimum wage laws fail to achieve the stated goals of their proponents, so does O’Rourke maintain that regime change, especially of the covert variety, suffers from the same flaw. Again, just as Mises does not challenge the stated goal of higher wages without unemployment, so does O’Rourke accept the goal of an increase in the power of the United States.
In order to grasp the way O’Rourke reaches her conclusion, we must first understand her use of terms. By “regime,” she means “either a state’s leadership or its political processes and institutional arrangements.” A covert regime change “denotes an operation to replace the political leadership of another state where the intervening state does not acknowledge its role publicly. These actions include successful and failed attempts to covertly assassinate foreign leaders, sponsor coups d’état, influence foreign democratic elections, incite popular revolutions, and support armed dissident groups in their bids to topple a foreign government.”
We have so far stressed how Mises and O’Rourke argue in a similar way, but now a crucial difference requires our attention. Mises showed by a priori reasoning that intervention must fail, but O’Rourke does not do this. She says instead that a detailed examination of many cases shows that the covert regime changes in fact tend to fail.
A few examples will illustrate how she proceeds. In the beginning years of the Cold War, the United States tried to “rollback” Communist regimes in Eastern Europe through covert operations. “The Anglo-American operations in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania … were doomed to failure from the start. As early as October 1945, MGB (Russian Ministry for State Security) counterintelligence officers captured Latvian infiltrators carrying Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) codebooks and radios. Forcing the infiltrators to collaborate, the MGB was able to provide false intelligence and identify the time and location of future infiltrations. Ultimately, Soviet forces set up two fictional resistance movements, which the United States and the United Kingdom covertly supported until 1954.”
Operations in Southeast Asia succeeded no better. Notoriously, “although the 1963 US-backed coup in South Vietnam successfully overthrew [Ngo Dinh] Diem’s government, it still did not produce the results the planners had hoped for. Contrary to policymakers’ predictions, the leaders who took over after Diem were unstable, unpredictable, and incompetent, which in turn hampered South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself without US assistance and encouraged the Viet Cong to escalate their attacks.”
Covert regime change was likewise ineffective in Latin America. “To combat the [Dominican Republic’s] chronic political volatility, Washington backed General Rafael Trujillo’s authoritarian regime after he seized power in a 1930 coup. By the late 1950’s, however, US leaders began to question Trujillo’s increasingly erratic and brutal rule. Concerned that his regime might spark a popular revolt similar to the one that had toppled Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Eisenhower authorized a covert campaign to overthrow Trujillo in 1960. But the operation misfired. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, but his fall brought his equally cruel son to power, which in turn led to a series of coups.”
Given this sorry record, the question naturally arises: why did the United States again and again pursue covert regime change? O’Rourke’s own explanation is along realist lines: nations see regime change as a way to enhance their power, and the pursuit of increased power is a constant in the international system. “I argue that states pursue regime change for motives akin to the ones that Realist scholars have provided to explain war … there is no single security motive driving states to intervene, and operations may have multiple overlapping motives. Nevertheless, the security motives that drove the United States to intervene can be grouped into three ideal types: offensive, preventive, and hegemonic. Each aimed to increase America’s relative power in a different way.”
If a key thesis of realist theory is right, though, regime change is unlikely to succeed. “[O]ne of the central tenets of Neorealism is that the specific composition of a state’s domestic leadership is irrelevant for explaining its international behavior because great powers behave in similar predictable patterns given their relative share of material power and geostrategic position.” If this is true, the newly installed government after a regime change is unlikely to shift its foreign policy in the way the intervening state wants. But states, avid for power, persist in this mistaken policy. (For this argument to Given this sorry record, the question naturally arises: why did the United States again and again pursue work, O’Rourke’s claim about the predictable patterns of great powers must apply also to smaller powers, since most efforts at regime change are not directed at great powers.)
O’Rourke criticizes other explanations of the pursuit of regime change, and her criticism strikes at the heart of democratic peace theory, a frequent rationale for an interventionist foreign policy. “According to normative variants of DPT [democratic peace theory], democracies do not go to war with other democracies, because liberal norms shape how democratic policymakers view one another and choose to resolve conflict.” If this hypothesis were correct, we would expect a democratic United States to support other democracies. But if covert operations are taken into account, this hypothesis fails. “American covert operations habitually violated norms of justified intervention: Washington installed brutal dictators. It broke international law. It collaborated with many unsavory organizations, including … numerous groups known to have committed mass killings.”
O’Rourke, one gathers, hopes that the United States will learn from the failure of covert regime change and instead pursue the inevitable grasp for power in a more rational manner. In this she resembles her mentor John Mearsheimer, who hopes that America will abandon ideological crusades in favor of “offshore balancing.” Those of us who, like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul, favor a noninterventionist foreign policy will not be satisfied with this. Instead, we need to ask deeper questions. Is the pursuit of power in the international system indeed inevitable? Does it not depend rather on human free choice? If so, the time has come to abandon completely a failed policy. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?”
Bob Murphy uses some samples from Dan Carlin’s amazing podcast, Hardcore History, to illustrate the flaws with state-provided military services. Bob concludes that minarchists have nothing to fear, and they should embrace the full vision of a voluntary society with no institutional coercion.
Mentioned in the episode: Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series on World War 1. Audio excerpts in this episode came from Parts IV and V in the series.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
The Hell o Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacyby Stephen M. WaltFarrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018xii + 384 pages
Stephen Walt has put himself in a difficult position. He is a Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author of studies, most notably The Origins of Alliances, which have won him influence in what he calls the “foreign policy establishment.” He says, “I have been part of that community for much of my professional life.” At the same time, he acknowledges, “I am surely something of an outlier within that world.”
That is decidedly an understatement, and this leads to Walt’s difficult position. Despite his impeccable credentials as a foreign policy “insider,” much of The Hell of Good Intentions consists of a fierce assault on most of his fellow members of the establishment. “To put it in the bluntest terms, instead of being a disciplined body of professionals constrained by a well-informed public and forced by necessity to set priorities and hold themselves accountable, today’s foreign policy elite is a dysfunctional caste of privileged insiders who are frequently disdainful of alternative perspectives and insulated both professionally and personally from the consequences of the policies they promote. It was impolitic for the deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes to dismiss this community as ‘the Blob,’ but the label nonetheless contains important elements of truth.”
According to Walt, the views of the Blob have led America to disaster. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States stood supreme in the world. “When the Cold War ended, the United States found itself in a position of global primacy unseen since the Roman Empire. It had the world’s largest and most advanced economy. ... The United States was also the only country in the world with a global military presence. ... Moreover, the United States was on good terms with all the other major powers ... relations with Russia were surprisingly cordial as the unipolar era began, as Moscow wanted Western help to transition to a market economy and was eager to forge cooperative security arrangements as well.”
Given this favorable position, the rational course of action was clear. America should have withdrawn from its global commitments. No threat faced us: why, then, did we need to police the world? Nevertheless, American commitments were maintained and extended. Walt holds that this was not done to protect America but rather, to a large extent, for reasons of ideology: “Most important, U.S. leaders did not seek primacy in order to protect the American homeland from invasion or attack. Rather, they sought it in order to promote a liberal order abroad. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama used military force more cautiously and discretely than George W. Bush did, but all three post-Cold War presidents saw U.S. military power as an invaluable tool for advancing an ambitious global agenda.”
The pursuit of liberal hegemony rests on faulty theory and has led to bad results. The supporters of liberal hegemony thought that a liberal world order was self-evidently desirable and that America had the power to impose it on nations that dared to resist: “If other states balked, U.S. policymakers were convinced that the United States had the tools to force them to comply. It could impose economic sanctions, give aid to a hostile regime’s foreign or domestic opponents, undermine rivals through covert action, and use military force to compel them to capitulate. If necessary, the United States could invade and depose hostile regimes at little cost or risk to itself. Once these obstreperous tyrants were gone, the United States and the rest of the liberal international community could step in and help liberated and grateful populations create new and legitimate democracies, thereby expanding the liberal, pro-American order even more.”
This ambitious program rests on flawed foundations. Walt is especially effective in his criticism of one of these foundations, “democratic peace theory.” Concerning this dubious doctrine, he says: “Although it is true that liberal democracies have fought few wars with each other, there is still no satisfactory explanation of why this is the case ... history also warns that newly democratized states are especially prone to internal and external conflicts. ... Democratic peace theory also says little about how liberal states should deal with authoritarian regimes, except to suggest that overthrowing them is the path to perpetual peace ... it is a potent recipe for trouble between liberal and non-liberal countries.”
Liberal hegemony failed in large part because it ignored basic “truths” about how nations act, true it has been a principal aim of the “structural realist” school of international relations, of which Walt and his colleague John Mearsheimer are leading members, to emphasize. “Imbalances of power make other states nervous, especially when the strongest state uses its power with little regard for others’ interests. It was entirely predictable that the so-called rogue states would look for ways to keep American power in check, for example because the United States had made spreading democracy a centerpiece of its grand strategy and taken dead aim at a number of these countries. ... America’s dominant position also alarmed some of America’s closest allies, including some foreign democracies. ... Their concerns were well-founded — not because the United States deliberately used its power to harm friendly countries like France, but because America’s vast capabilities made it easy to hurt them by accident. The invasion of Iraq is a perfect illustration: it eventually led to the emergence of ISIS, whose online recruiting and brutal conduct inspired terrorist attacks in a number of European countries and contributed to the refugee crisis that engulfed Europe in 2015.”
Despite the manifest failure of the liberal hegemony program, its advocates have retained their influence. They are rarely called to account for their mistakes. Walt writes with justifiable bitterness about one group among these advocates, the neoconservatives. “When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record for ‘second chances’ and ‘failing upward’ are America’s neoconservatives. Beginning in the mid-1980s, this influential network of hard-line pundits, journalists, think tank analysts, and government officials developed, purveyed and promoted an expansive vision of American power as a positive force in world affairs. They conceived and sold the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein and insisted that this bold move would enable the United States to transform much of the Middle East into a sea of pro-American democracies. ... None of their rosy visions have come to pass, and if holding people to account were a guiding principle inside the foreign policy community, these individuals would now be marginal figures.” They in fact remain influential, and Elliot Abrams, one of the neoconservatives Walt discusses, has recently been appointed United States Special Representative to Venezuela.
Walt’s case against liberal hegemony is convincing, but what does he propose to put in its place? True to his structural realism, he calls for “offshore balancing.” Under this policy, the United States would abandon its futile attempt to spread liberal democracy throughout the world. Instead, America would concentrate on selected areas deemed to be vital national interests. “Offshore balancers believe that only a few areas of the globe are of vital importance to U.S. security or prosperity and thus worth sending Americans to fight and die for. The first vital region is the Western hemisphere itself, where America’s dominant position ensures that no neighbor can pose a serious threat to the U.S. homeland. ... But unlike isolationists, offshore balancers believe that three distant regions also matter to the United states: Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf.”
In these regions, the aim of the United States would be to prevent the emergence of a “local hegemon.” If one seemed on the horizon, America should encourage states in the region to “balance against” the rising power. America would remain “offshore” as long as possible, although military intervention would by no means be excluded if the regional states failed in their efforts to balance.
Walt is right that his strategy would “prolong America’s position of primacy” for much less cost than the policy of liberal hegemony, but why is it in our interest to maintain American supremacy at all? Walt has not fully broken from the globalist assumptions he attacks so well throughout The Hell of Good Intentions. We should instead adopt the non-interventionist policy so ably championed by Ron Paul: only the defense of the United States itself is a “vital national interest.” Walt’s failure to follow the logic of his own argument against hegemony to a non-interventionist conclusion explains why he is an “outlier” in the foreign policy establishment rather than a complete opponent of that group. That is unfortunate, but his book contains a great deal of value to those who favor peace and prosperity as national goals.
Hans Hoppe takes on the most difficult subject in economic and political theory: the provision of security. He argues that the service is better provided by free markets than government, while addressing a hundred counter-arguments. Here we have an important updating of an argument rarely made even in the libertarian tradition.
Narrated by Jim Vann.
Download the complete audiobook (10 MP3 files) here. This audiobook is also available on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and via RSS.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Narrated by George Pickering.
In 1944 Ludwig von Mises published Omnipotent Government, his historical treatment of Nazism and its origins in the collapse of German liberalism. This book expands on earlier works like Nation, State, and Economy and Liberalism, applying their analysis to the terrible events of WWII. Europe was up in flames, but Mises skillfully explains how to defeat the total state and its advocates.
Professor Matt McCaffrey joins the show to consider this vital book and its absolute relevance today. Everyone interested in peace should read it, and send a copy to a politician who needs it.
Read or listen to the book for free here, or enter code HAPOD in our bookstore for $5 off the hardcover edition.
Subscribe and listen to the Human Action Podcast on iTunes, YouTube, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play, Spotify, or via RSS.
Bob brings on Mises Institute founder Lew Rockwell to primarily discuss Lew’s article in defense of Lori Loughlin (“Free Lori Loughlin and All Political Prisoners”). Why is the FBI involved in a college admission scandal in the first place? And why is Lori Loughlin’s behavior so much worse than all the other cheating that happens systematically? Bob and Lew then discuss the chilling role of the FBI in American life, as well as various methods by which the CIA takes care of business. Bob also asks Lew questions submitted in the Bob Murphy Show Facebook group.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
How ironic that Pompeo and the rest of the neocons in the Trump Administration are ready to violate the US Constitution in order to attack Venezuela to "restore their constitution."
Original Article: "A Nuclear War? Over Venezuela?".
Season 3, Episode 54 After Grant’s army moved on from Pittsburg Landing, the horrors of the battle remained for the people living there. Focusing primarily on the story of nine-year-old Elsie Duncan, Chris recounts the terrible years that followed the Battle of Shiloh for the civilians left in its wake.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Jeff Deist joins David Gornoski to discuss the impending train-wreck of runaway government spending, and why the average person doesn't feel the effects of huge foreign-policy expenditures by government. They also talk about the influence of media outlets during catastrophic events such as the recent terrorist attack in Sri Lanka.
David Gornoski's A Neighbor's Choice Radio airs live Monday 7–9pm and Tuesday–Thursday 8–9pm ET on NewsRadio WFLA in Orlando, 93.1 FM and 540 AM
Season 3, Episode 53 "Professor CJ" of the Dangerous History Podcast joins Chris Calton to tell the story of Shiloh from the perspective of two soldiers, from their own personal memoirs of the battle. One story follows the experiences of Henry Morton Stanley, a twenty-one-year-old Confederate. The other story involves the sixteen-year-old John Cockerill, a Union drummer boy. These two eloquently written memoirs illustrate the true history of the Civil War better than any account of officer deaths or battlefield tactics.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 52 The second day of battle brought fresh Union soldiers to the battlefield. They could hardly comprehend the destruction they witnessed from the day before. The bloodshed resumed until the overwhelmed Confederates were forced to retreat to Corinth. This episode also tells the oft-neglected story of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, in which William Tecumseh Sherman and Nathan Bedford Forrest met each other in battle.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 51 As the Union line fell back, they condensed at the bottom of a ravine. As the thousands of soldiers in each army crowded in to fight in the narrowest portion of the battlefield, the area earned the nickname “The Hornet’s Nest.” Before the day was done, thousands of men would fall, including the highest ranking officer to lose his life during the entire war.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 50 At the beginning of the Battle of Shiloh, the Confederacy caught the Union by surprise. However, one Union Colonel suspected that an attack was coming, and he formed his men into a defensive line that bought the rest of the Union troops time to join the fight. Instead of a quick Confederate victory, both armies faced a bloody battle of attrition.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 49 Following the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, Grant’s commanding officer still wanted to remove him from command. During this time, he formed a strong friendship with William Tecumseh Sherman. As the Union army was amassing troops at Pittsburg Landing, the Confederate forces in the West were concentrating at Corinth. The Confederates decided that they should take the initiative in the coming battle.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Need the state to provide national defense? Think again, and get ready for a wild intellectual ride. With eleven chapters by top libertarian scholars on all aspects of defense, this book edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe represents an ambitious attempt to extend the idea of free enterprise to the provision of security services.
Narrated by George Pickering.
Download the complete audiobook (14 MP3 files) here. Also available on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 48 While Confederates were facing disaster at Leetown, General Van Dorn and his Confederates at Elkhorn Tavern were fighting the Union forces with more success. But after pushing the Union forces back on the first day of fighting, they found out that they would not be reinforced by General Ben McCulloch’s 7,000 man division. This two-day battle is often overshadowed by other battles that were fought shortly before and after it, but at the time it took place, the Battle of Pea Ridge was the bloodiest battle the war had yet seen.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 47 The Battle of Pea Ridge was fought on two fronts, one at Leetown, and the other at Elkhorn Tavern. The combat at Leetown was led by Ben McCulloch, who commanded a force that greatly outnumbered the Union opponents. But due to a series of unfortunate disasters, the Confederate assault would fall apart, demonstrating what is likely the greatest example of a breakdown in leadership during the entire war.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 46 After Grant pushes the Confederates back to Fort Donelson, the southern leaders had to decide whether to attempt escape or surrender. Ultimately, the surrender was carried out in a way that created scandal for the Confederate leaders who did manage to escape, and it gave Grant the opening to earn his nickname in the North: “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 45 The Battle of Fort Donelson would take place over several days. Waged from two fronts, the land and the river, the battle would seem to be turning in favor of the Confederates. While Ulysses S. Grant was off the battlefield consulting with the naval commander, Captain Foote, the Confederates would push the Union back, opening the door for escape.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 44 By taking Fort Henry, Ulysses S. Grant and Andrew Hull Foote gained access to the Tennessee River. This waterway gave them access to the Confederate heartland, and by taking the Fort, they were able to probe deep into Alabama. This earned the Union a bounty of new supplies, and also struck a tremendous psychological blow against the Confederates in the Deep South who believed that they were, up to that point, secure from Yankee invasion.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 43 As Lincoln grew impatient with his generals, he sent an order demanding action. In the West, Ulysses S. Grant was eager to comply, while other Union generals dithered and delayed offensive operations. Confederate forces were building forts on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers – Forts Henry and Donelson – and they believed that the Union attack would focus on the Mississippi. But coming into 1862, the Union officers had realized that it was this pair of rivers running through Kentucky and Tennessee that would serve as the gateway to the Confederacy.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 42 On March 9th, 1862 — the day after the ironclad Merrimack destroyed two Union warships — the Confederate navy would meet its match in battle against the USS Monitor. Both sides would claim victory in the battle, but the true legacy would be the transformation of naval warfare across the globe.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 41 John Ericsson’s design for the Monitor was only a skeleton when he was awarded the contract to have it built. In a race to match the feared Merrimack, Ericsson had to quickly construct a working, combat-ready iron ship that would receive its first test in combat. If the ship proved a failure, Ericsson would be forced by the US government to pay back every penny invested in the experimental ship – which most people expected to sink like a rock. This episode details the incredible process of constructing this technological marvel.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 40 The Union’s response to the Confederate ironclad was an iron warship of its own. Unlike the Merrimack, the USS Monitor was a tremendous technological innovation, nearly single-handedly designed by a Swedish engineer named John Ericsson. This episode details his incredible life and the many failures that would culminate in the successful Monitor that would make him famous.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Bob provides an introductory framework on how to analyze the economics of immigration, as well as the politics involved in this controversial topic. The point isn't to pick sides, but to sharpen everyone's arguments. For example, make sure your arguments about immigration don't "prove" that having babies makes a country poorer.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 39 On March 8, 1862, the ironclad Merrimack — renamed the CSS Virginia — was tested in battle against three of the Union’s most powerful wooden ships. The outcome of the battle would usher in a new age of naval warfare, in which wooden ships would be rendered entirely obsolete.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 38 To combat the superior size of the United States Navy, the Confederacy believed that its best strategy was to build a technologically superior — if much smaller — Navy. The cornerstone of this strategy was to recover the USS Merrimack and plate it with iron, making it the first ironclad warship in North America.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 37 Early in 1862, General Ambrose Burnside conquered the North Carolina coast, providing an important — but often overlooked — strategic victory for the Union.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Norman Horn is the founder and president of the Libertarian Christian Institute. He and Bob have a provocative conversation that will enlighten both believers and skeptics alike. They critically analyze the tendency of American Christians to support war, in its domestic and foreign applications. Norman gives Bob the best, succinct analysis of Romans 13 he has ever encountered. Bob ends (playing devil's advocate) by challenging Norman to explain why the Church isn't just as exploitative as the State.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 36 In this mini-episode, Chris Calton briefly reviews the important themes and takeaways from the first year of the war.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
After World War II, the "Old Right" was derailed by an interventionist group of anti-communist crusaders—and Libertarian ideas went by the wayside. Here, Murray Rothbard tells the sorry tale from the inside.
Narrated by Ian Temple.
Download the complete audiobook (16 MP3 files) here. This audiobook is also available on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 35 In this episode, Chris Calton details how technological innovations changed the course of naval warfare. By taking advantage of this new technology, the Union Navy was able to easily capture Hatteras Inlet and Port Royal Sound, which would prove strategically important in the establishment of their blockade.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 34 At the outset of the war, Winfield Scott came up with his “Anaconda Plan” to blockade the entire southern coast. This looked to be easier said than done, as the Union had a very small navy. The Confederates, by contrast, had no navy at all. This episode details the ways that both countries tried to overcome these problems in order to fight a war on the waters.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 33 With many of the Civilized Indians wishing to remain neutral in the Civil War, a Muscogee leader named Opothle Yahola led a group of thousands of fugitives to Kansas. As they fled, Confederate soldiers, along with their Native American allies, gave chase, fighting a series of battles known as the Trail of Blood on Ice.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 32 After being forced to move west during the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee Nation was bitterly divided into two factions. Although they remained officially unified, the factionalism remained through the Civil War and reemerged as a division between the Cherokee who favored the Union, or at least neutrality, and those who wanted to ally with the Confederacy. Similar to the border states, the decision to join the Confederacy was controversial, and many Native Americans refused to fall in line, demonstrating that the alliance with the Confederacy was not as simple as many historians make it seem.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC. Subscribe today at Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via RSS.
Antiwar hero and all-around genius Scott Horton joins Bob for a lengthy discussion covering the siege and massacre at Waco, the motivations and perverse logic of the U.S. government's interventions in the Middle East, and how Donald Trump staved off the establishment at the Republican convention and after the general election.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Season 3, Episode 31 In 1861, the Five Civilized Tribes — the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles — would be faced with the decision of staying neutral or choosing a side in the Civil War. To understand their decision, Chris Calton takes a look at the long history of Indians becoming, in the eyes of Americans, "civilized".
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 31st episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 30. After months of growing tension between the United States and Britain, a single event nearly plunged the two countries into war. When a Union naval officer illegally boarded a British mail ship and arrested two Confederate diplomats, many British leaders saw it as a deliberate provocation, engineered by William Seward, to provoke Britain into a war over its Canadian territory. After news of the arrest reached London, tempers were so high that many people, in reflection, believe that the only thing that prevented war was the delayed communication between the two countries that came from a broken telegraph cable.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 30th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 29. Even before taking office, Secretary of State William Seward had a history of making threatening statements toward Britain. After the war began, he continued to make one diplomatic faux pas after another, worrying Britain enough that they started sending troops to Canada in preparation for a possible war with the United States.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 29th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 28. The Union defeat at Ball’s Bluff would prove to be the final straw for the Congressional Republicans, who had been growing increasingly distressed by the Union failures at the outset of the war. Their response was to form a committee tasked with investigating the war—which really meant a political witch hunt determined to find alleged secessionist sympathizers and military scapegoats upon whom the politicians could place the blame for the Union failures.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 28th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 27. After General Stone’s “slight demonstration” erupted into a small-scale battle, communication errors and battlefield mistakes continued to make matters worse for the Union army. The battle would not only end in a Union defeat, but it would also claim the life of one of President Lincoln’s closest personal friends.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 27th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 26. The Battle of Ball’s Bluff was a minor battle with major consequences. In this episode, Chris Calton details all the mistakes that were made leading up to the battle, setting the stage for a Union catastrophe.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 26th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Presented at the Mises Institute's 2018 Supporters Summit in Auburn, Alabama. Recorded on September 27, 2018.
Season 3, Episode 25. Lincoln believed that Kentucky, one of the four remaining slave states, was crucial to the Union war effort. Although the state was more thoroughly Unionist than other border states, such as Missouri and Maryland, the administration did not want to take any chances, sending the state’s loyalists thousands of guns and carrying out a policy of political arrests to ensure that Kentucky could not be taken over by secessionists. This episode concludes our look at the border states and the Union effort to prevent their secession.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 25th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Point of clarification: Although I didn't technically get this wrong, I believe my wording may have been unintentionally misleading. In a paragraph that is largely about the Northern presence in Kentucky, I say "General Leonidas Polk was occupying two towns in western Kentucky by September 3rd." This is correct, but I did not clarify for those who may not have been aware that Polk was a Confederate General, and that this occupation was a Confederate violation of Kentucky’s neutrality, which was justified by Polk on the grounds that the Union violated Kentucky’s neutrality first. In reviewing the context of my statement, I realize that listeners may likely interpret Polk as a Union officer.
Season 3, Episode 24. When Virginia decided to join the South, many Unionists in the western portion of the state were opposed to the move. The Lincoln administration wanted them to select representatives for “Restored Virginia,” maintaining the pretense that they were representing all of Virginia for the Union. But the Unionist political leaders were already imagining a secession of their own.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 24th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 23. As the fear of spies and traitors spread through the North, political arrests became commonplace, even in states as far north as Maine. Anybody expressing any anti-war sentiment would be assumed to be a traitor and a secessionist, and arrests were carried out according to a guilty-until-proven-innocent policy. Martial Law was not confined to the slave states.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 23rd episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 22. With former Republican presidential contender John C. Frémont now in charge of the Department of the West, the policies of Martial Law would be extended to the entire state of Missouri. Included in Frémont’s declaration of Martial Law is the first emancipation proclamation of the war — a proclamation that would not sit well with President Lincoln, who was worried about the effect such a dictate might have on Kentucky.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 22nd episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 21. After an early morning victory, the Battle of Wilson’s Creek concentrates on a hill that would later be named Bloody Hill. Despite the advantages won by a successful surprise attack, the Union army would find itself on the defensive, and the battle would end with the first general officer killed in the Union army.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 21st episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 20. The second large scale battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Wilson’s Creek would prove to be one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war, in proportion to the number of men participating. Lyon initiates the battle in an aggressive early morning ambush, hoping to cripple the larger Confederate forces before ordering the Union retreat to safer territories.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 20th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 19. As the Union forces pursue the Missouri secessionists to the southwest corner of the state, they fight a number of small skirmishes that serve as preludes to the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 19th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 18. After the “Walnut Street Massacre” in St. Louis, more people shift their support to the Confederacy. In response, Nathaniel Lyon declares war on the state of Missouri, and wages the first small, but significant, battle of the state in Booneville.
Season 3, Episode 17. Nathaniel Lyon, a notoriously harsh officer in the US army, is sent to St. Louis to ensure Missouri’s place in the Union. His policies have the effect of alienating much of the population of the city, which is predominantly Unionist, leading to the formation of a secessionist resistance group at Camp Jackson.
Season 3, Episode 16. The Union defeat at Bull Run changed the perspective on the war for everybody in the North. The confidence in a decisive war that would be won with a single battle was shattered. Northern presses spread fabricated stories of rebel barbarity, and Union politicians look for people to blame. In the South, there were no celebrations for the costly victory. The aftermath of Bull Run produced the first signs of the harsh reality of the bloody war that was only beginning.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 16th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 15. With new Confederate troops arriving throughout the afternoon, McDowell takes one last stand at Chinn Ridge, only to have fresh Confederate arrivals from the Army of the Shenandoah drive back his last brigade. As the Army of the Potomac retreats, the Confederates pursue them, taking several prisoners, including one Republican Congressman who was among the civilian spectators who’d come expecting an easy Union victory.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 15th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 14. Leading the stand on Henry Hill was Thomas Jackson, where he would earn his nickname “Stonewall.” To drive Jackson off the hill, McDowell orders a Napoleon-esque artillery charge, resulting in the bloodiest fighting of the day, as the newly-rifled weaponry renders the artillery charge ineffective, and both armies fight for control of the canons. The tide begins to turn for the Confederates.
Season 3, Episode 13. The morning hours of the First Battle of Bull Run concentrated on Matthews Hill, where the outflanked Confederates tried desperately to hold their ground, only to be driven back by the superior numbers of the Army of Northeastern Virginia. With Matthews Hill occupied by the Union by the afternoon, the battle looked won, but the Confederate forces were taking a new position on Henry Hill, where they would rally in the afternoon.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the 13th episode in the third season of Historical Controversies. You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Season 3, Episode 12. Three days before the major battle, regiments from the Army of Northeastern Virginia, under the command of Irvin McDowell, and the Army of the Potomac, under Pierre Beauregard, face off on the southeastern point of the Manassas battle site, resulting in a minor Confederate victory. For most soldiers, this skirmish offered them the first glimpse at what real combat was like, having had no formal training to prepare them.
Season 3, Episode 11. Leading up to the First Battle of Bull Run, Joseph E. Johnston takes command of the Army of the Shenandoah, and Robert Patterson counters with the Army of Pennsylvania. Patterson’s objective is to prevent Johnston from joining Pierre Beauregard at Manassas Junction. But, misled by poor intel, Patterson fails to attack Johnston’s smaller army, allowing Johnston to start moving his troops to reinforce Beauregard’s Army of the Potomac.
Daniel McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute gave a talk last weekend about groups funding war propaganda in mainstream and social media, and how they prevent anti-interventionist voices from being heard on those same platforms.
Companies like YouTube, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are now judging—and banning—ideological content based on the guidance of really evil organizations like the Atlantic Council, Snopes.com, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
All of this poses serious questions for doctrinaire libertarians, not only concerning free speech, but also property rights: remember, these are ostensibly private companies free to operate as they see fit.
Season 3, Episode 8. Only days after Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers, troops began moving to Washington DC, having to pass through Baltimore—a city full of secessionists. Seeing the movement of troops from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts as nothing less than a foreign invasion, Baltimore citizens resisted the movement of the troops, leading to the first blood spilled in combat during the Civil War. Following the riots, the secessionists took over Baltimore, and the city effectively seceded—cutting itself off from the North and vowing that no more Union soldiers be allowed to pass through their city.
You may support this podcast financially at Mises.org/SupportHC.
Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute speaks on the vital subject of "Military Keynesianism"—the unholy alliance among defense contractors, foreign policy mouthpieces, and think tanks that work together to create ongoing demand for war armaments, always keeping the American people alarmed and ready for the next military intervention. Recorded in Fort Worth, Texas, on 2 June 2018. Includes an introduction by Jeff Deist.
Jeff Deist welcomes guests to the Mises Circle in Fort Worth: "Will the American Economy Survive in 2018?" Recorded in Fort Worth, Texas, on 2 June 2018. Includes an introduction by Ryan Griggs.
Daniel McAdams and Jeff Deist discuss "Military Keynesianism," the unholy practice of using war and foreign interventionism to create phony economic growth inside the DC Beltway. Daniel is the best around when it comes to explaining the US foreign policy imperium, so don't miss him and our great lineup in Fort Worth, this weekend.
Season 3, Episode 6. The official beginning of the Civil War came on April 12th, when the Confederacy commenced their attack on Fort Sumter. In this episode, Chris Calton gives the immediate context of the battle, and tells the incredible story of one of the most significant episodes in the history of the United States.
Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the sixth episode in the third season of Historical Controversies.
A week ago Trump tweeted about leaving Syria. Now the US and other western nations stand at the brink of a new war in Syria, one that threatens much greater conflict with Russia. Daniel McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute joins Jeff Deist to discuss whether John Bolton is now running US foreign policy, what Bibi Netanyahu told Trump on the phone, and whether cooler heads in the administration are thinking about second and third order effects. Have we learned anything at all from Libya and Iraq? And, how do interventionists maintain wars with no popular support beyond the Beltway?
See the Mises.org editorial "Against War in Syria".
The great James Bovard addresses our annual research conference in Auburn on the dismal failures of government regulation — from farm subsidies to steel tariffs to FDA drug trials.
[Excerpt from Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era, Patrick Newman, ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2017), from chap. 13 "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals," pp. 428–36.]
World War I was the apotheosis of the growing notion of intellectuals as servants of the State and junior partners in State rule. In the new fusion of intellectuals and State, each was of powerful aid to the other. Intellectuals could serve the State by apologizing for and supplying rationales for its deeds. Intellectuals were also needed to staff important positions as planners and controllers of the society and economy. The State could also serve intellectuals by restricting entry into, and thereby raising the income and the prestige of, the various occupations and professions. During World War I, historians were of particular importance in supplying the government with war propaganda, convincing the public of the unique evil of Germans throughout history and of the satanic designs of the Kaiser. Economists, particularly empirical economists and statisticians, were of great importance in the planning and control of the nation's wartime economy. Historians playing preeminent roles in the war propaganda machine have been studied fairly extensively; economists and statisticians, playing a less blatant and allegedly "value-free" role, have received far less attention.For a refreshingly acidulous portrayal of the actions of the historians in World War I, see C. Hartley Grattan, "The Historians Cut Loose," American Mercury, August 1927, reprinted in Haw Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Publisher, 1972), pp. 142–164. A more extended account is George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970). Gruber, Mars and Minerva, deals with academia and social scientism, but concentrates an historians. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words that Won the War (Princeton University Press, 1939), presents the story of the "Creel Committee," the Committee on Public Information, the official propaganda ministry during the war.
Although it is an outworn generalization to say that nineteenth century economists were stalwart champions of laissez faire, it is still true that deductive economic theory proved to be a mighty bulwark against government intervention. For, basically, economic theory showed the harmony and order inherent in the free market, as well as the counterproductive distortions and economic shackles imposed by state intervention. In order for statism to dominate the economics profession, then, it was important to discredit deductive theory. One of the most important ways of doing so was to advance the notion that, to be "genuinely scientific," economics had to eschew generalization and deductive laws and simply engage in empirical inquiry into the facts of history and historical institutions, hoping that somehow laws would eventually arise from these detailed investigations.
Thus the German Historical School, which managed to seize control of the economics discipline in Germany, fiercely proclaimed not only its devotion to statism and government control, but also its opposition to the "abstract" deductive laws of political economy. This was the first major group within the economics profession to champion what Ludwig von Mises was later to call "anti-economics." Gustav Schmoller, the leader of the Historical School, proudly declared that his and his colleagues' major task at the University of Berlin was to form "the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern."
During the 1880s and 1890s bright young graduate students in history and the social sciences went to Germany, the home of the PhD degree, to obtain their doctorates. Almost to a man, they returned to the United States to teach in colleges and in the newly created graduate schools, imbued with the excitement of the "new" economics and political science. It was a "new" social science that lauded the German and Bismarckian development of a powerful welfare-warfare State, a State seemingly above all social classes, that fused the nation into an integrated and allegedly harmonious whole. The new society and polity was to be run by a powerful central government, cartelizing, dictating, arbitrating, and controlling, thereby eliminating competitive laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and the threat of proletarian socialism on the other. And at or near the head of the new dispensation was to be the new breed of intellectuals, technocrats, and planners, directing, staffing, propagandizing, and "selflessly" promoting the common good while ruling and lording over the rest of society. In short, doing well by doing good. To the new breed of progressive and statist intellectuals in America, this was a heady vision indeed.
Richard T. Ely, virtually the founder of this new breed, was the leading progressive economist and also the teacher of most of the others. As an ardent postmillennialist pietist, Ely was convinced that he was serving God and Christ as well. Like so many pietists, Ely was born (in 1854) of solid Yankee and old Puritan stock, again in the midst of the fanatical Burned-Over District of western New York. Ely's father, Ezra, was an extreme Sabbatarian, preventing his family from playing games or reading books on Sunday, and so ardent a prohibitionist that, even though an impoverished, marginal farmer, he refused to grow barley, a crop uniquely suitable to his soil, because it would have been used to make that monstrously sinful product, beer.See the useful biography of Ely, Benjamin G. Rader, The Academic Mind and Reform: The Influence of Richard T. Ely in American Life (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1966). Having been graduated from Columbia College in 1876, Ely went to Germany and received his PhD from Heidelberg in 1879. In several decades of teaching at Johns Hopkins and then at Wisconsin, the energetic and empire-building Ely became enormously influential in American thought and politics. At Johns Hopkins he turned out a gallery of influential students and statist disciples in all fields of the social sciences as well as economics. These disciples were headed by the pro-union institutionalist economist John R. Commons, and included the social-control sociologists Edward Alsworth Ross and Albion W. Small; John H. Finlay, President of City College of New York; Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of the Review of Reviews and influential adviser and theoretician to Theodore Roosevelt; the municipal reformer Frederick C. Howe; and the historians Frederick Jackson Turner and J. Franklin Jameson. Newton D. Baker was trained by Ely at Hopkins, and Woodrow Wilson was also his student there, although there is no direct evidence of intellectual influence.
In the mid-1880s Richard Ely founded the American Economic Association in a conscious attempt to commit the economics profession to statism as against the older laissez-faire economists grouped in the Political Economy Club. Ely continued as secretary-treasurer of the AEA for seven years, until his reformer allies decided to weaken the association's commitment to statism in order to induce the laissez-faire economists to join the organization. At that point, Ely, in high dudgeon, left the AEA.
At Wisconsin in 1892, Ely formed a new School of Economics, Political Science, and History, surrounded himself with former students, and gave birth to the Wisconsin Idea which, with the help of John Commons, succeeded in passing a host of progressive measures for government regulation in Wisconsin. Ely and the others formed an unofficial but powerful brain trust for the progressive regime of Wisconsin Governor Robert M. La Follette, who got his start in Wisconsin politics as an advocate of prohibition. Though never a classroom student of Ely's, La Follette always referred to Ely as his teacher and as the molder of the Wisconsin Idea. And Theodore Roosevelt once declared that Ely "first introduced me to radicalism in economics and then made me sane in my radicalism."Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought 1865–1901 (Ann Arbor: Univenity of Michigan Press, 1956), pp.239–240.
Ely was also one of the most prominent postmillennialist intellectuals of the era. He fervently believed that the State is God's chosen instrument for reforming and Christianizing the social order so that eventually Jesus would arrive and put an end to history. The State, declared Ely, "is religious in its essence," and, furthermore, "God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution." The task of the church is to guide the State and utilize it in these needed reforms.Fine, Laissez Faire, pp. 180–181.
An inveterate activist and organizer, Ely was prominent in the evangelical Chautauqua movement, and he founded there the "Christian Sociology" summer school, which infused the influential Chautauqua operation with the concepts and the personnel of the Social Gospel movement. Ely was a friend and close associate of Social Gospel leaders Revs. Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Josiah Strong. With Strong and Commons, Ely organized the Institute of Christian Sociology.John Rogers Commons was of old Yankee stock, descendant of John Rogers, Puritan martyr in England, and born in the Yankee area of the Western Reserve in Ohio and reared in Indiana. His Vermont mother was a graduate of the hotbed of pietism, Oberlin College, and she sent John to Oberlin in the hopes that he would become a minister. While in college, Commons and his mother launched a prohibitionist publication at the request of the Anti-Saloon League. After graduation, Commons went to Johns Hopkins to study under Ely, but flunked out of graduate school. See John R. Commons, Myself (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). Also see Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking, 1949), vol. 3. 276–277; Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), pp. 198–204. Ely also founded and became the secretary of the Christian Social Union of the Episcopal Church, along with Christian Socialist W.D.P. Bliss. All of these activities were infused with postmillennial statism. Thus, the Institute of Christian Sociology was pledged to present God's "kingdom as the complete ideal of human society to be realized on earth." Moreover,
Ely viewed the state as the greatest redemptive force in society. In Ely's eyes, government was the God-given instrument through which we had to work. Its preeminence as a divine instrument was based on the post-Reformation abolition of the division between the sacred and the secular and on the State's power to implement ethical solutions to public problems. The same identification of sacred and secular which took place among liberal clergy enabled Ely to both divinize the state and socialize Christianity: he thought of government as God's main instrument of redemption….Quandt, "Religion and Social Thought," pp. 402–403. Ely did not expect the millennial Kingdom to be far off. He believed that it was the task of the universities and of the social sciences "to teach the complexities of the Christian duty of brotherhood in order to arrive at the New Jerusalem "which we are all eagerly awaiting." The church's mission was to attack every evil institution, "until the earth becomes a new earth, and all its cities, cities of God."
When war came, Richard Ely was for some reason (perhaps because he was in his sixties) left out of the excitement of war work and economic planning in Washington. He bitterly regretted that "I have not had a more active part then I have had in this greatest war in the world's history."Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 114. But Ely made up for his lack as best he could; virtually from the start of the European war, he whooped it up for militarism, war, the "discipline" of conscription, and the suppression of dissent and "disloyalty" at home. A lifelong militarist, Ely had tried to volunteer for war service in the Spanish-American War, had called for the suppression of the Philippine insurrection, and was particularly eager for conscription and for forced labor for "loafers" during World War I. By 1915 Ely was agitating for immediate compulsory military service, and the following year he joined the ardently pro-war and heavily big business–influenced National Security League, where he called for the liberation of the German people from "autocracy."See Rader, Academic Mind, pp. 181–191. On top big business affiliations of National Security League leaders, especially J.P. Morgan and others in the Morgan ambit, see C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (New York Vanguard Press, 1929) pp. 117–118, and Robert D. Ward, "The Origin and Activities of the National Security League, 1914–1919," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47 (June 1960): 51–65.
In advocating conscription, Ely was neatly able to combine moral, economic, and prohibitionist arguments for the draft: "The moral effect of taking boys off street corners and out of saloons and drilling them is excellent, and the economic effects are likewise beneficial."The Chamber of Commerce of the United States spelled out the long-run economic benefit of conscription, that for America's youth it would "substitute a period of helpful discipline for a period of demoralizing freedom from restraint." John Patrick Finnegan, Against the Specter of Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), p. 110. On the broad and enthusiastic support given to the draft by the Chamber of Commerce, see Chase C. Mooney and Martha E. Layman, "Some Phases of the Compulsory Military Training Movement, 1914–1920," Mississippi Historical Review 38 (March 1952): 640. Indeed, conscription for Ely served almost as a panacea for all ills. So enthusiastic was he about the World War I experience that Ely again prescribed his favorite cure-all to alleviate the 1929 depression. He proposed a permanent peacetime "industrial army" engaged in public works and manned by conscripting youth for strenuous physical labor. This conscription would instill into America's youth the essential "military ideals of hardihood and discipline," a discipline once provided by life on the farm but unavailable to the bulk of the populace now growing up in the effete cities. This small, standing conscript army could then speedily absorb the unemployed during depressions. Under the command of "an economic general staff," the industrial army would "go to work to relieve distress with all the vigor and resources of brain and brawn that we employed in the World War."Richard T. Ely, Hard Times: The Way in and the Way Out (1931), cited in Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New Yark: Viking, 1949). vol. 5, p. 671; and in Leuchtenburg, "The New Deal," p. 94.
Deprived of a position in Washington, Ely made the stamping out of "disloyalty" at home his major contribution to the war effort. He called for the total suspension of academic freedom for the duration. Any professor, he declared, who stated "opinions which hinder us in this awful struggle" should be "fired" if not indeed "shot." The particular focus of Ely's formidable energy was a zealous campaign to try to get his old ally in Wisconsin politics, Robert M. La Follette, expelled from the US Senate for continuing to oppose America's participation in the war. Ely declared that his "blood boils" at La Follette's "treason" and attacks on war profiteering. Throwing himself into the battle, Ely founded and became president of the Madison chapter of the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion and mounted a campaign to expel La Follette.Ely drew up a super-patriotic pledge for the Madison chapter of the Loyalty Legion, pledging its members to "stamp out disloyalty." The pledge also expressed unqualified support for the Espionage Act and vowed to "work against La Follettism in all its anti-war forms." Rader, Academic Mind, pp. 183ff. The campaign was meant to mobilize the Wisconsin faculty and to support the ultrapatriotic and ultrahawkish activities of Theodore Roosevelt. Ely wrote to TR that "we must crush La Follettism." In his unremitting campaign against the Wisconsin Senator, Ely thundered that La Follette "has been of more help to the Kaiser than a quarter of a million troops."Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 207. "Empiricism" rampant.
The faculty of the University of Wisconsin was stung by charges throughout the state and the country that its failure to denounce La Follette was proof that the university — long affiliated with La Follette in state politics — supported his disloyal antiwar policies. Prodded by Ely, Commons, and others, the university's War Committee drew up and circulated a petition, signed by the university president, all the deans, and over 90 percent of the faculty, that provided one of the more striking examples in United States history of academic truckling to the State apparatus. None too subtly using the constitutional verbiage for treason, the petition protested "against those utterances and actions of Senator La Follette which have given aid and comfort to Germany and her allies in the present war; we deplore his failure loyally to support the government in the prosecution of the war."Ibid., p. 207.
Behind the scenes, Ely tried his best to mobilize America's historians against La Follette, to demonstrate that he had given aid and comfort to the enemy. Ely was able to enlist the services of the National Board of Historical Service, the propaganda agency established by professional historians for the duration of the war, and of the government's own propaganda arm, the Committee on Public Information. Warning that the effort must remain secret, Ely mobilized historians under the aegis of these organizations to research German and Austrian newspapers and journals to try to build a record of La Follette's alleged influence, "indicating the encouragement he has given Germany." The historian E. Merton Coulter revealed the objective spirit animating these researches: "I understand it is to be an unbiased and candid account of the Senator's [La Follette's] course and its effect — but we all know it can lead but to one conclusion — something little short of treason."Ibid., pp. 208n.
Professor Gruber well notes that this campaign to get La Follette was "a remarkable example of the uses of scholarship for espionage. It was a far cry from the disinterested search for truth for a group of professors to mobilize a secret research campaign to find ammunition to destroy the political career of a United States senator who did not share their view of the war."Ibid., pp. 209–210. In his autobiography, written in 1938, Richard Ely rewrote history to cover up his ignominious role in the get–La Follette campaign. He acknowledged signing the faculty petition, but then had the temerity to claim that he "was not one of the ring-leaders, as La Follette thought, in circulating this petition…." There is no mention of his secret research campaign against La Follette. In any event, no evidence was turned up, the movement failed, and the Wisconsin professoriat began to move away in distrust from the Loyalty Legion.For more an the anti-La Follette campaign, see H.C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War: 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 68–72; Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), p. 120; and Belle Case La Follette and Fola La Follette, Robert M. LaFollette (New York: Macmillan, 1953), volume 2.
After the menace of the Kaiser had been extirpated, the Armistice found Professor Ely, along with his compatriots in the National Security League, ready to segue into the next round of patriotic repression. During Ely's anti–La Follette research campaign he had urged investigation of "the kind of influence which he [La Follette] has exerted against our country in Russia." Ely pointed out that modem "democracy" requires a "high degree of conformity" and that therefore the "most serious menace" of Bolshevism, which Ely depicted as "social disease germs," must be fought "with repressive measures."
By 1924, however, Richard T. Ely's career of repression was over, and what is more, in a rare instance of the workings of poetic justice, he was hoisted with his own petard. In 1922 the much-traduced Robert La Follette was reelected to the Senate and also swept the Progressives back into power in the state of Wisconsin. By 1924 the Progressives had gained control of the Board of Regents, and they moved to cut off the water of their former academic ally and empire-builder. Ely then felt it prudent to move out of Wisconsin together with his Institute, and while he lingered for some years at Northwestern, the heyday of Ely's fame and fortune was over.
Season 2, Episode 18. After thwarting a conspiracy with by his Nicaraguan allies who turned against him, William Walker sets up a new government and installs himself as the President. While embroiled in a war, he issues decrees that he hopes will encourage American volunteers, including opening the country to slavery. This episode is Part 5 of 6 in the story of William Walker’s attempt at establishing his own Republic of Nicaragua.
Daniel McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute joins Jeff Deist for an unbridled discussion of the true costs of war. We know the US spends more on "defense" than many big countries combined, but what are the actual numbers? How long can the federal budget sustain empire and entitlements? Will rising interest rates finally force Congress to stop expanding wars, building bases, buying useless weapons systems, and meddling around the world? And is Trump the president far more hawkish than Trump the candidate? This is a great conversation with one of the leading libertarian foreign policy voices.
Season 1, Episode 8. In Vietnam, many soldiers found narcotics to be a coping agent against the horrors of war. Narcotics also became an easy scapegoat for a government looking to obfuscate the results of its own actions. In this episode, Chris Calton explains how the US government escalated the War on Drugs at home, while serving as a drug runner in Southeast Asia.
Our guest Scott Horton just released an important new book—Fools Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. This is the definitive treatment of the war itself, the history and factions involved, and the disturbing policy mindset that keeps this deeply unpopular conflict churning. Don't miss this interview with one of the leading antiwar libertarians of our time.
[Patrick Newman is editor of a forthcoming book by Murray Rothbard titled The Progressive Era. Dr. Newman recently spoke with us about the book and Rothbard's innovative views on the period.]
THE AUSTRIAN: Why is this book only being published now and how did you become involved?
PATRICK NEWMAN: The book totals 15 chapters and begins with an unpublished manuscript (Chapters 1–9) that Rothbard wrote in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s Rothbard stopped working on the manuscript but continued his project by writing essays on what he planned to include in the later chapters. These essays are included in the book (Chapters 10–15). The original book manuscript is only being published now because it was a rough draft and was in a relatively disorganized state in the Rothbard archives. Archivist Barbara Pickard and I spent a considerable amount of time searching for all of the pages in the manuscript (Rothbard fortunately numbered his pages, so it was easy to see what we had and what we were missing).
I was a Fellow at the Mises Institute in 2012 and 2013, and in the second year I spent time working in the Rothbard archives. One of the projects I worked on was an unpublished and deleted chapter of Man, Economy, and State on producer’s theory, later published in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics as “Original Chapter 5: Producer’s Activity” (2016). At the 2015 Austrian Economics Research Conference I spent some time working in the archives in order to finish the unpublished chapter. While there I stumbled upon some of the chapters of the Progressive Era manuscript, and over the next couple of years I spent a significant amount of time reading and researching on the time period. We later found more and more chapters of the book and the project grew from there.
TA: What is different about Rothbard’s perspective on the Progressive Era, and why is the era so important to understand?
PN: Most historians consider the Progressive Era a very important and beneficial time period in American history. This is because the common perception of the late 19th century is that it was plagued by harmful monopolies, unsafe working conditions, poor quality consumer products, crippling deflation, and frequent and severe business cycles. The country was rapidly industrializing, and in order for it to fully grow up, the government needed to take a more activist role in regulating the economy. The Progressive Era was when the populist masses and well intentioned social reformers rose up, fought the established interests, and instituted enlightened measures essential for modern society.
Rothbard turns this entire explanation on its head. He argues that not only are the standard myths of the late 19th century untrue, and that businesses were fiercely competitive and living standards significantly rose, but that the Progressive Era was not due to the masses or altruistic intellectuals. It instead was due to a coalition of businesses looking to institute regulations in order to cartelize markets and hamper competition, and power seeking government officials and intellectuals looking to actively plan and run society. It is essential to understand that the early 20th century was not progressive, but actually regressive, because it pushed the economy back to the old system of mercantilism. The current relationship between the modern state and the economy has its roots in the Progressive Era.
TA: Rothbard has written on the Progressive Era before. What is new in these writings?
PN: The unpublished manuscript contains material that Rothbard briefly alluded to in other writings, such as in A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2005) and The Case Against the Fed (1994), or covered in his lecture series "The American Economy and the End of Laissez-Faire: 1870 to World War II" (1986). His analysis covers important historical events from the Civil War era to Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency (1901–1909). He starts off with an extensive discussion of railroads, from the Civil War subsidies to the interventions up to and after the formation of the Interstate Commerce Commission (1887). He then describes the failed merger movement around the turn of the century when businesses unsuccessfully attempted to monopolize markets. He also spends a considerable amount of time chronicling the political battles between the laissez-faire Democrats and the interventionist Republicans in the third party system (1854–1896) of American politics, and describes the fall of the relatively noninterventionist Democratic Party after William Jennings Bryan and the Populists supplanted Grover Cleveland and the Bourbon Democrats for control of the party in 1896. He then describes the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and the various federal, state, and local interventions that occurred. Lastly, there is an unpublished section of his important essay “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals” (published in this book as Chapter 13) on the drive by scientists and other professionals to centralize scientific activity under government aegis through the National Research Council.
TA: Looking at our current political situation, what can we apply from Rothbard’s work on the Progressives to understanding our own time?
PN: One of the important questions Rothbard asks in the book is how a surge in government intervention occurred at the beginning of the 20th century, despite an American tradition to individualism and laissez-faire. By what means was the state, especially on the federal level, able to drastically increase its power and scope over society? Rothbard answers this question by pointing to the fall of the major laissez-faire force in America, the Democratic Party. During the late 19th century there were two main factions in the Democratic Party: the Bourbons, or the classical liberal laissez-faire wing generally centered in the Northeast and Midwest, and the emerging statist Populists, centered in the South and Far West.
In the 1890s, after the Panic of 1893 the Populists were able to wrestle control of the party structure away from the Bourbon Democrats, culminating in the election of 1896 when the Populist William Jennings Bryan lost to William McKinley. This election marked the beginning of the increased similarity between the two center statist parties, the downplaying of ideology, and increased voter turnout. Moreover, it coincided with the emergence of a bureaucratic state shielded from voter control and mainly interested in aggrandizing government power over the economy.
The same system exists today, only at an accelerated pace. Both the Democrats and Republicans are interventionist in their own ways, and voters are presented with very little real choice between candidates. Moreover, most of the US government is unaccountable to the public in elections, it consists of an army of unelected bureaucrats that are resistant to change and act largely with regard to their own self-interest. The current political environment of two pro-big government parties, lack of choice for the voters, and administrative state all derives from the Progressive Era.
TA: Where does this new book stand when compared to Rothbard’s other works? (Is this just a minor work or something more?)
PN: The entire book, counting the unpublished manuscript and published essays that complete his narrative by describing later events in the Progressive Era, such as social and urban reform, World War I, the Federal Reserve, and Herbert Hoover in the 1920s, is over 500 pages. It is a monumental work that stands in the same realm of importance as his other historical books, such as America’s Great Depression (1963), Conceived in Liberty (1975, 1975, 1976, 1979), and A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2005). The book shows Rothbard the historian at his best: a grand synthesizer who creates his own unique narrative and draws on a wealth of historians and various disciplines and fields of research, including Austrian economics, libertarian philosophy, economic history, political science, and power elite analysis. Rothbard spent an enormous amount of his academic career reading, writing, and researching on the time period, a book collection with just Rothbard’s previously published essays on the Progressive Era would highlight this. But the unpublished manuscript shows so much more of Rothbard’s system of thought that he only spoke about in lectures or briefly mentioned in footnotes. It is a magnificent complement to Rothbard’s other works and is essential reading for anyone interested in the Progressive Era, Austrian economics, or libertarianism.
Daniel McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity joins Jeff to discuss Trumpian foreign policy in light of the president's recent speech on Afghanistan.
The costs of our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria—human and economic—keep piling up. How do such deeply unpopular wars go on so long? Why do sensible notions of peace and non-intervention fail to gain a foothold in Congress or the White House? How does the War Party in DC plays both sides? And, how do they silence anti-war voices like Tulsi Gabbard? This is a no-holds-barred discussion of the grim realities behind US foreign policy.
Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible. — Ludwig von Mises
Peace is popular.
That was Ron Paul’s message to our audience in Texas earlier this spring, and it has been his consistent message since first running for Congress in the 1970s. So why do seemingly endless wars remain such a stubborn feature of the American presidency, with the shameful complicity of Congress?
Americans who supported Trump did so overwhelmingly because he promised a populist “America First” approach to both domestic and foreign policy. Every poll shows that the domestic economy, culture wars, and immigration were the animating issues of the election — not our ongoing military misadventures in the Middle East. Nobody voted for an escalation of US involvement in Syria, nobody voted to ramp up the never-ending war in Afghanistan by dispatching the Mother of All Bombs, and nobody voted to resurrect an absurd decades-old conflict with North Korea.
Yet President Trump has done all of these things, largely abandoning the noninterventionist promises of Candidate Trump. Perversely, ordering a missile attack on a Syrian air base was the first and only act that earned him praise from his enemies at organs like the New York Times and Washington Post. “He’s finally acting presidential” they gushed.
To understand Trump’s departures from his campaign rhetoric is to understand the very nature of politics and the bureaucratic state. Nobody goes to Washington to “run” the government. Washington runs them.
Trump, ostensibly the biggest outsider to win the presidency in modern American history, cannot overcome the entrenched foreign policy establishment any more than he can overcome gravity. Ninety-five percent of employees at the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies do not come and go with elections. They, along with the vast apparatus of defense contractors, are not going anywhere.
Permanent war and interventionism requires permanent funding. And like all tax-funded enterprises, war is inherently anti-capitalist. It diverts resources, swells state bureaucracies, and hides the horrific human and economic costs in a cloak of patriotism and platitudes about America’s role in the world. When we hear Vice President Pence talk about “rebuilding the arsenal of democracy,” he really means it.
Ludwig von Mises saw German war socialism up close as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army during the Great War. Under Wehrwirtschaftslehre, the German doctrine of war economics, the normal calculations of capitalist businessmen go out the window. Costs, quality, demand, and profit become wholly secondary to the overriding goal of preparing the nation for war. Thus war drives the impulse toward autarky (something we’ve seen in Trump) and economic dictatorship: the will and whims of ordinary citizens must yield to war production.
Thus in his darkest moments during the war, Mises resolved to write the definitive refutation of state controlled economies. The result was his 1922 classic Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, which remains perhaps the most important critique of collectivism ever written. It’s a book everyone should read and share, to understand the fundamental link between war and collectivism.
Dr. Paul’s message of peace and nonintervention is so critical today. It’s a message that is decidedly popular (outside of DC), nonpartisan, and tailor-made for a new century. It resonates with young and old alike, with rich and poor, and across racial lines. It’s popular with the alt-Right and the progressive Left, budget hawks and Greens, Burkean conservatives and tie-dyed peaceniks. We just need to get the message to Mr. Trump.
"From the Publisher" column from the current issue of The Austrian.