All Posts Tagged With: "world war I"
Great 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 Modern Union versus Workers’ Rights
The raging controversy in Wisconsin over eliminating collective bargaining “rights” for government employees cast a bright and harsh light on public-sector unions. Some commentators have distinguished public-sector unions from private-sector unions, but the vested interests of the two are much the same. Both are expressions of what might be called “the modern union,” which came [...]
22Jun2011 | Wendy McElroy | 4 comments | ContinuedFear-Mongering and Servitude
In his 1776 essay, “Thoughts on Government,” John Adams observed, “Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.” The [...]
22Jun2011 | James Bovard | 33 comments | ContinuedWhy American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism
In one of his most iconoclastic essays, “The Anatomy of the State,” Murray Rothbard observed that it is crucial to ruling groups to manipulate the thinking of the ruled. They must get the populace to accept that the rulers are truly good people working tirelessly to advance the common good. Toward that end, the rulers [...]
22Dec2010 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | ContinuedChurchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq
Americans, it is often said, are in general ignorant of history, both their own and that of other countries around the world. This lack of historical knowledge and understanding means that too many Americans cannot appreciate the context of many political events in other parts of the globe. For example, the political conflicts and atrocities [...]
5Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Depression You’ve Never Heard Of: 1920-1921
When it comes to diagnosing the causes of the Great Depression and prescribing cures for our present recession, the pundits and economists from the biggest schools typically argue about two different types of intervention. Big-government Keynesians, such as Paul Krugman, argue for massive fiscal stimulus—that is, huge budget deficits—to fill the gap in aggregate demand. [...]
18Nov2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 73 comments | ContinuedFrom the Armistice to the Great Depression
When the Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918, bringing World War I to a close, the belligerent nations of Europe were economically almost prostrate—their labor forces and capital stocks depleted greatly, their domestic economic structures distorted grotesquely, and their old arrangements for international trade and investment shattered. To make matters worse, the Versailles Treaty, [...]
1Dec2006 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – November 2006
"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;
mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the
Politics and the History of Our Time
by
"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;
mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">Ludwig von Mises "Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;
mso-bidi-language:AR-SA"> Reviewed
by Richard M. Ebeling
1776
by David McCullough
Reviewed by George C. Leef
Active
Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution
by Stephen Breyer
Reviewed by Michael DeBow
Making
Great Decisions in Business and Life
by David R. Henderson and Charles
L. Hooper Reviewed by Philip R. Murray
The History of “Underdevelopment”
Perhaps the most important feature of the modern world is its sustained, intensive economic growth. This produces most of the other distinctive features of modernity. Although there were earlier episodes of such economic efflorescence (to use Jack Goldstones term), it was only with the industrial revolution of late eighteenth-century Britain that it became a permanent and prominent feature of the world economy. Following the advent of this transformative process, questions soon arose elsewhere. The first was that of how to achieve the same kind of growth and dynamism. Soon this led to further questions: why other parts of the world did not show these qualities and why their attempts to do so ended in failure.
1Jun2006 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedLudwig von Mises: The Political Economist of Liberty, Part 1
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. Over a professional career that spanned almost three-quarters of the twentieth century, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was without any exaggeration one of the leading and most important defenders of economic liberty. The ideas of individual freedom, the market economy, and limited government that he defended in [...]
1May2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Austrian Inflation
Wars always bring great destruction in their
wake. Human lives are lost or left crippled;
wealth is consumed to cover the costs of
combat; battles and bombs leave accumulated capital in
ruins; real and imagined injustices turn men against the
existing order of things; and demagogues emerge to play
on the frustrations and fears in peoples minds.
1914 and the World We Lost
Ninety years ago this month, on June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist in the city of Sarajevo. It served as the spark which set off the events that started World War I later that summer. It also [...]
1Jun2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedFrom Pennsylvania to Verdun: Friedrich List and the Origins of World War I
World War I, or the “Great War” (as most Europeans still call it), was one of the biggest disasters in human history. It not only killed and maimed millions, the cream of a generation, it also destroyed the liberal, cosmopolitan system that had been created in the nineteenth century. It was, moreover, the direct cause [...]
1Jan2004 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great German Inflation
Eighty years ago this month, on November 15, 1923, the Great German Inflation came to an end when the monetary printing presses were finally shut down. The German people had gone through nine years of ever-greater monetary expansion, ever-more soaring prices, the financial destruction of much of the society’s middle class, a massive misdirection and [...]
1Nov2003 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – October 2003
The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I by Thomas Fleming Basic Books • 2003 • 543 pages • $30.00 Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling Imagine how different the twentieth century might have been if Lenin and the Bolsheviks had never come to power in Russia in 1917 and had not set in motion all the cruel crimes that were [...]
1Oct2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedWartime Curbs on Liberty Are Costless?
In one of the most provocative opinion articles of recent times, “Security Comes Before Liberty” (Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2001), Jay Winik argued (1) that in previous national emergencies, U.S. presidents took strong repressive measures against citizens and other residents of the country, (2) that the repressive measures implemented so far by the Bush [...]
1Mar2002 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedHow War Amplified Federal Power in the Twentieth Century
This article is reprinted from the July 1999 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. After surveying the Western world in the past six centuries, Bruce Porter concluded: “a government at war is a juggernaut of centralization determined to crush any internal opposition that impedes the mobilization of militarily vital resources. This centralizing tendency of [...]
1Dec2001 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | Continued-
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