All Posts Tagged With: "war"
Ten Years After
After 9/11 the U.S. Congress created the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). America went to war, overtly and covertly, in several countries. Nearly $8 trillion was spent on what is called “security,” Chris Hellman of the National Priorities Project estimates. Was it worth it? Yes, in many ways, says author [...]
30Nov2011 | John Stossel | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Other Test: Debts and Taxes
States and polities—or rather the ruling classes that control them—face two great tests in the course of history. Failure to meet them typically leads to disaster and even the dissolution of the State. The first and most familiar is war, armed conflict with other States (or more accurately, other ruling groups). By analogy wars can [...]
26Oct2011 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedLibertarianism Today
Libertarianism is attracting more attention than ever. As the economic and social damage done by Leviathan increases exponentially Americans are coming to understand that government power is the root of our many troubles. The idea that a consistent philosophy based on freedom and peaceful cooperation among all people is the only path out of the [...]
26Oct2011 | George C. Leef | 5 comments | ContinuedGreat Wars & Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal
Essential to the maintenance of support for the government (almost any government, any time) is the idea that the nation’s wars have been just and heroic, and that the leaders who presided over them were great men. Ugly truths about those wars and leaders are routinely swept under the rug. Court historians (and yes, democracies [...]
21Sep2011 | George C. Leef | 24 comments | ContinuedThe Greatest Commercial Ever?
I can’t resist sharing this classic Coca Cola commercial. It brings a tear to my eye. Watch the men’s faces closely. The spot says so much — far more than Coke intended, I’m sure — without a word spoken. HT: Roderick Long
19Jul2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedAnti-Interventionism Is Cold Indifference?
Presidents frequently garner applause when they go to war. Violence as a knee-jerk response to a crisis—do anything, but do something!—is surprisingly popular. Pundits doubtless expect that they too will reap acclaim for urging action, whether or not it’s well considered. Who wants to be thought of as a bump on a log, after all? [...]
22Jun2011 | Gary Chartier | 3 comments | ContinuedAmerica’s Greatness Requires War and Taxes?
New York Times columnist David Brooks thinks America is great but in trouble, and he wants to take steps to preserve American preeminence. He’s right, though not in the way he thinks. In his November 11, 2010, column Brooks argued that we need some sort of National Greatness Agenda; the problem is that his conception [...]
21Apr2011 | Aeon J. Skoble | 1 comment | ContinuedCivil War and the American Political Economy
The task before us is to assess in largely material terms the political-economic system arising during and after the American Civil War. Ideological issues existed, certainly, but much evidence suggests that pure idealism had a rather limited run. Antislavery was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes. Slavery [...]
23Mar2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Civil War and the Statist Mentality
On April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began with the Confederate bombardment of the U.S. military’s Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Nearly four bloody years later to the day, the war ended with Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. This issue of The Freeman is largely devoted to [...]
23Mar2011 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWar Is a Government Program
Libertarians and conservatives who argue for economic freedom and against government control tend to make both principled and practical arguments for their positions. Take health insurance, for example. The principled argument against government regulation of health insurance is twofold: (1) No government has the right to dictate to someone what kind of insurance he should [...]
23Mar2011 | David R. Henderson | 22 comments | ContinuedIntellectuals and Society
If you trace back to the origins of almost any damaging public-policy idea in America, you find it rooted in the imagination of some intellectual. Just to pick one field, consider housing. Why do we have huge tracts of depressing, unsafe, unclean public housing in some of our largest cities? That did not simply happen—the [...]
24Feb2011 | George C. Leef | 5 comments | ContinuedRichman in Christian Science Monitor
My op-ed on WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, and the cost of Empire is in today’s Christian Science Monitor.
30Nov2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Bourne Pronouncement
War is indeed the health of the State, all States, and ipso facto the enemy of individual freedom.
30Nov2010 | Sandy Ikeda | 10 comments | ContinuedThe Broken-Window Fallacy Writ Large and Dangerous
Veteran Washington Post political columnist David Broder yesterday: What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy. Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II. Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With [...]
1Nov2010 | Sheldon Richman | 9 comments | ContinuedDeficit Hawks or War Hawks?
Last month I asked if the American people can afford a world-girdling foreign policy more befitting an empire than a republic. Look at it this way: War hawks make poor deficit hawks. Facing a $13 trillion national debt and trillion-dollar-plus annual budget deficits, we can’t afford to be complacent about foreign interventions costing $12 billion [...]
22Oct2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedMilitary Keynesians Are the Worst Keynesians of All
From the National Journal this week: Two wars are not enough. America’s economic outlook is so grim, and political solutions are so utterly absent, that only another large-scale war might be enough to lift the nation out of chronic high unemployment and slow growth, two prominent economists, a conservative and a liberal, said today. Nobelist [...]
6Oct2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Newspeak of Paul Krugman
No critic of free-market economics can ever again accuse us of being irrational and immoral when it is Paul Krugman who says destruction creates wealth, and war is an acceptable second-best path to economic growth.
30Sep2010 | Steven Horwitz | 39 comments | Continued-
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