Author: Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Students of free enterprise usually trace the origins of pro-market thinking to Scottish professor Adam Smith (1723-90). This tendency to see Smith as the fountainhead of economics is reinforced among Americans because his famed book An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nation was published the year of American independence from Britain. There is much that this view of intellectual history overlooks. The real founders of economic science actually wrote hundreds of years before Smith. They were not economists as such, but moral theologians, trained in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, and they came to be … Continue reading →

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[Editor’s note: As we face another so-called government shutdown, some may recall that we’ve been down this road before. In this 1996 article, Lew Rockwell explains that government “shutdowns” are neither as unpopular, or as troublesome, as the media and Washington politicians assume.] According to official history, the 104th Congress doomed itself when it shut down the government to force its budget priorities on the president. People got up in arms and demanded that government be reopened. This taught the people and their representatives a valuable lesson. As much as we may complain, we truly need big government. Today, we all … Continue reading →

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That’s nothing new, of course. It began with our first issue in 1999, and has gotten more intense ever since. Just recently, the despicable NY Times, Washington Post, and National Review have vented their spleens once again. You’d think big, establishment organs like the two newspapers wouldn’t care. But they do. LRC drives them crazy (crazier?).  They can’t stand the truth, especially as enunciated by Murray Rothbard and Rothbardians. Murray has more and more influence. Both NyTi and WaPo are notoriously close to the CIA. National Review was founded by CIA agent Bill Buckley, and all continue to fight for … Continue reading →

The post The Enemies of Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

That’s nothing new, of course. It began with our first issue in 1999, and has gotten more intense ever since. Just recently, the despicable NY Times, Washington Post, and National Review have vented their spleens once again. You’d think big, establishment organs like the two newspapers wouldn’t care. But they do. LRC drives them crazy (crazier?).  They can’t stand the truth, especially as enunciated by Murray Rothbard and Rothbardians. Murray has more and more influence. Both NyTi and WaPo are notoriously close to the CIA. National Review was founded by CIA agent Bill Buckley, and all continue to fight for … Continue reading →

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Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day? There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order. But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level … Continue reading →

The post The Nazis Were Leftists appeared first on LewRockwell.

Many left libertarians demand open borders. Nations have no significance, they tell us. To think otherwise, to recognize any limits to immigration, arbitrarily restricts people’s liberty. Those of us who think otherwise, they say, are no better than fascists. Joe Salerno’s brilliant and comprehensive article, “Mises on Nationalism, the Right to Self-Determination, and the Problem of Immigration” shows that Mises rejected the extreme anti-nationalist, open borders position. As Salerno shows, Mises supported “liberal nationalism,” one of the most important political movements of the 19th century. For him, the choices of individuals were bedrock.   People belonging to a single language community … Continue reading →

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Some of our assumptions are so deeply embedded that we cannot perceive them ourselves. Case in point: everyone takes for granted that it’s normal for a country of 320 million to be dictated to by a single central authority. The only debate we’re permitted to have is who should be selected to carry out this grotesque and inhumane function. Here’s the debate we should be having instead: what if we simply abandoned this quixotic mission, and went our separate ways? It’s an idea that’s gaining traction – much too late, to be sure, but better late than never. For a … Continue reading →

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Amid all the hysteria surrounding Donald Trump, clear and sober analyses of who he is and what to expect have been few and far between. I’ve already seen numerous progressives warning that Trump intends to eviscerate entitlements. It’s as if facts never enter the progressive consciousness. Their opponents are an undifferentiated blob and hold what progressives take to be generically right-wing positions. Only this robotic approach to politics can account for why progressives seem to think Donald Trump, by far the most pro-LGBT GOP nominee in history, intends to harm homosexuals, or that despite his repeated assurances that he wants nothing … Continue reading →

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This talk was delivered at the Boston Mises Circle on October 1, 2016. Last week marked the 135th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, and that’s an appropriate moment to revisit Guido Hulsmann’s brilliant biography of this great man, Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism. I commend this book to you, incidentally, not simply for its profile of a seminal figure, but also as an outstanding work of intellectual history that incidentally offers the reader a graduate course in the history of economic thought. As I reread the concluding sections, I was struck by the difference in temperament between … Continue reading →

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Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day? There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order. But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level … Continue reading →

The post The Unique Evil of the Left appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently, on the Kate Dalley Show, I promised a list of 10 shorter works for the intelligent layman interested in learning about Austrian economics and libertarianism. After all, our first job—to make resistance possible–is to educate ourselves. Here is a great start: Frederic Bastiat, The Law Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow ___, Planned Chaos ___, Planning for Freedom Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., Against the State Murray N. Rothbard, Anatomy of the State ___, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty ___, What Has … Continue reading →

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In 2012, Barack Obama warned that the United States would fall into a depression if Ron Paul’s plan to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget were enacted. Wait, I beg your pardon. It wasn’t Obama who warned that budget cuts would lead to a depression. It was Mitt Romney. Romney went on to become the nominee of the self-described free-market party. An ideological rout is complete when both sides of respectable opinion take its basic ideas for granted. That’s how complete the Keynesian victory has been. In fact, Keynesianism had swept the boards a decade before Romney was even … Continue reading →

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At the beginning of the year I outlined three trends we should cheer. And now, just three months later, one of them is proceeding so rapidly that the bad guys are in an outright panic. Thus: a recent column in Commentary, a neoconservative publication, warned that “anyone with the Internet can write a blog or tweet or Facebook post or can Skype or record a podcast. The castle no longer has walls. The gatekeepers are mostly useless.” That’s pretty much what I said, too, except my remarks weren’t a warning. They were a celebration. Any lover of freedom has to … Continue reading →

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Fifty years ago this year, Murray N. Rothbard offered his thoughts on National Review, the flagship magazine of American conservatism, which had commemorated its tenth anniversary in late 1965. He went on to tell the full story in The Betrayal of the American Right, at once an intellectual history and a memoir. Murray’s primary complaint: what had once been a movement skeptical of or opposed to overseas adventurism and empire-building had now, under the influence of editor Bill Buckley, come to be defined by those very things. In Buckley’s infamous formulation, it would be necessary to erect a “totalitarian bureaucracy” … Continue reading →

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Super Tuesday may have been the beginning of the end for the Bernie Sanders campaign, but the ideas that propelled it are likely to linger for quite some time. With some writers comparing Bernie to Ron Paul (not in terms of economics and philosophy, of course, but as insurgent candidates), now seemed like an opportune moment to examine the Sanders message and legacy, and compare it to Ron’s. Like Ron, Bernie surprised all the pundits with his fundraising, polling, and electoral success. In fact, so successful has Sanders been that Hillary Clinton has been reduced to a pathetic and unconvincing … Continue reading →

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