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The Nationals Should Not Celebrate the Military

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I really wish that the Washington Nationals would stop glorifying the American military. I love baseball and nothing beats going to Nationals Park to see a ballgame. But to integrate the nation’s military into the game detracts from the experience and degrades our culture. A baseball game is one of my favorite places to be. As a libertarian, I long for a free society, and a baseball game is one of the most vivid expressions of a harmonious society that anyone can experience. It is peace and cooperation writ large. For one, the players are not trying to hurt each other as in football. As Cal Ripken quipped, it is a friendly game. Aside from some notorious baseball towns, the peacefulness of the game is also reflected in the peacefulness of the crowd. Such is the spirit of the game that it is not uncommon for fans to applaud spectacular plays made by the visiting team. As such, ...

Why the U.S. Blew a Chance to Reconcile with Iran

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In the late 1980s the U.S. government had an opportunity to change its relationship with Iran from hostile to nonadversarial. It had been hostile since 1979, when the Islamic revolution overthrew the brutal U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Iranians held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. The relationship deteriorated further when the Reagan administration helped Iraq after it attacked Iran and as the Iraqi forces used chemical weapons on the Iranians. During the war, the U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing the more than 200 people aboard. (On the other side, the Reagan administration sold arms to Iranians in an attempt to free American hostages in Lebanon and to finance aid to the Contras in Central America.) Despite all this, reports Gareth Porter in his important new book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, change was in the air in 1989. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died and was ...

TGIF: Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty: Still Worthy after All These Years

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In 1982 Murray Rothbard published his magnum opus in political philosophy, The Ethics of Liberty. It is a tour de force, a remarkable presentation of the moral case for political freedom. What a complement to Man, Economy, and State and Power and Market, Rothbard’s towering contributions to our understanding of free markets! The first striking feature of Ethics is that the opening five chapters, which comprise part 1, seek to establish the validity of natural law, an approach to moral inquiry based on the distinctive nature, faculties, and tendencies of the human being; this approach began with the ancient Greek philosophers and developed through the thought of Catholic and Protestant thinkers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius. (For these religious philosophers, natural law was discoverable through reason, and was separable from theological questions.) One can judge Rothbard’s deep interest in this subject by his first four chapter titles: “Natural Law and Reason,” ...

The War on Terrorism Is One Fine Scam

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Throughout the Cold War, the proponents of the national-security state assured us that the only reason the United States needed to adopt this totalitarian-like apparatus was because of the international communist conspiracy emanating from the Soviet Union and Red China. Once the Cold War was won, the statists said, America could restore the limited-government constitutional republic that the Constitution ...