Libertarian Lessons from the Super Bowl by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2022 Even most non-sports fans like me know that the Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL). It is one of the world’s most watched sporting events, and it has the most expensive commercials (lately $7 million for 30 seconds). Some people watch the game just to see the commercials and the halftime show. ...
The Centenary of Ludwig von Mises’s Critique of Socialism by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2022 At a banquet dinner held in New York City on March 7, 1956, honoring the famous Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, another equally renowned member of the Austrian school of economics, Friedrich A. Hayek, delivered a talk highlighting the important contributions of his long-time mentor and close friend, going back to when they first met in the Vienna of ...
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich, Part 1 by George Leef June 1, 2022 Part 1 | Part 2 Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich — How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Throughout almost all of human history, people lived miserably — far worse than even Thomas Hobbes famously said. Improvements? There weren’t any. Happiness? That ...
Restore Our Republic by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2022 As predictable as thunder following lightning, former CIA director Robert Gates recently declared that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasing assertiveness demonstrate the need for the U.S. government to remain an ever-growing, more powerful national-security state. Gates’s declaration appeared in an op-ed in the March 3, 2022, issue of the Washington Post. He also pointed to Iran and ...
Federal Testing Debacle Multiplied COVID Carnage by James Bovard May 1, 2022 On a bitter cold January afternoon, lines of people awaiting free COVID tests stretched around the block at a Rockville, Maryland, public library. Looking at the scene reminded me of seeing East Germans lined up in endless queues in the 1980s to receive their potato and sauerkraut rations. But few of the people docilely waiting in Rockville recognized that ...
Conservatism, Libertarianism, and John Stuart Mill by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2022 Although most conservatives of today seem to have forgotten him, conservatives of yesteryear honored and revered Russell Kirk (1918–1994). After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State College (now University), Kirk earned his master’s degree at Duke University and then his doctor of letters from the University of St. Andrews. Kirk was a prolific writer who wrote not only ...
In the Beginning: The Mont Pelerin Society, 1947 by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 2022 Seventy-five years ago, there occurred an important event in the post–World War II revival of free-market liberal ideas. Over the first ten days of April 1947, 39 people from Europe and the United States met in a hotel in Switzerland at a mountain place known as Mont Pelerin. They came together to discuss the future of economic, social, and ...
Human Irrationality and Free Markets by Antony Sammeroff May 1, 2022 If everyone was irrational all of the time, we would be in big trouble. You’d never know when someone was suddenly going to swerve off the road for no apparent reason and drive into a building, or start babbling to you in tongues over the phone when all you wanted to do was order a pizza. That being said, people ...
Let’s End the Cold War Racket by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2022 One of the most under-reported aspects of President John F. Kennedy’s term in office was his decision to end the Cold War and establish peaceful and friendly relations with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the rest of the communist world. In 1963 America, that was a remarkable — and highly dangerous — thing for any president to do. After all, ...
The Latest Media Assault on Freedom by James Bovard April 1, 2022 Prominent journalists are calling for the media to champion a “pro-democracy” bias in how they portray politicians and government agencies. But tub-thumping for democracy — or at least for politicians who claim to be pro-democracy — is a poor substitute for exposing the proliferation of government abuses. Freedom will be the victim if journalists grasp a new pretext to ...
There Is No Federal Solution by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2022 The twentieth century in the United States can certainly be characterized by the massive increase in federal solutions to right every wrong, correct every injustice, and fix every problem, real or imaginary. This mentality is what gave us things like the New Deal, Social Security, Prohibition, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Deal, the ...
Can Capitalism Survive? 80 Years After Schumpeter’s Answer by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 2022 Eighty years ago, in the midst of the Second World War, Austrian-born economist Joseph A. Schumpeter published one of his most famous books, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). A central question that he asked and tried to answer was, “Can Capitalism Survive?” His basic conclusion was, “No, I do not think it can” (p. 61). He was (forlornly) confident ...