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Order by Agreements or by Iron Fists

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In his 1651 classic, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes warned: "To obey the King who is God's lieutenant, is the same as to obey God. We shall have no peace till we have absolute obedience." Many contemporary statists share Hobbes's assumption that near-total control is the only way to avoid near-certain destruction — that without a policeman, a bureaucrat, and a politician watching over their every move, citizens would beat their wives, starve their children, poison their customers, and blow up city hall. Supposedly, it is only the restraining hand of government that prevents the total dissolution of civilization, and the more power the restraining hand possesses, the safer civilization becomes. How much subjugation is necessary to preserve civil peace? At what point do force and threat of force subvert order? French philosopher Pierre Bayle wrote, "It is not tolerance, ...

Book Review: Defend America First

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Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 19391942 by Garet Garrett (Caldwell, Idaho, 2003); 285 pages; $13.95. It has now long been taken for granted by the American citizenry that the president of the United States, in his role as commander in chief, has the authority and power to send American armed forces into harms way anywhere in the world, at any time, for practically any purpose, and at virtually his own discretion. Americans do not realize how relatively new a power this is for the executive branch of the U.S. government. It is true that in the 19th century American forces intervened in various parts of the world. For instance, in the 1870s America briefly fought its first Korean War. An American merchant vessel went aground along the coast of Korea, and the survivors of the ship were hacked to death by the local natives. The U.S. government demanded an apology and an indemnity for the loss ...

Book Review: The Mind and the Market

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The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought by Jerry Z. Muller (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); 487pages; $30. In the 1920s and 1930s, the well-known Italian classical-liberal historian Guglielmo Ferrero attempted to explain the reasons for the social disruptions and civil wars that European society had gone through from the time of the French Revolution in 1789. His general conclusion was that the revolutions and civil wars of the 19th century and then the Great War of 19141918 were in one way or another concerned with the problem of political legitimacy. For ages, political legitimacy had been based on hereditary monarchy. And with monarchy had come the structure of hierarchically ordered society. All in the social order knew their place. They were born into it, they lived out their lives as members of one of the social classes and castes, and their positions in this inherited vertical arrangement ...

Covering the Map of the World — The Half-Century Legacy of the Yalta Conference, Part 6

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In 1940, the Japanese consul general in Harbin, Manchuria, intercepted several messages sent from the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo. In one of these messages, Molotov told his ambassador: "We concluded an 'Agreement with Germany' because a war is required in Europe" between the capitalist nations, to open the door for the future ...