Author: Thomas DiLorenzo

The Vatican recently released a report on “the present economic-financial system” of the world that is typical of all pronouncements about economics from the Catholic Church bureaucracy:  It is astoundingly ignorant of even elementary economic concepts, and is written in the language of a C-/D+ high school writing assignment.  There is confusion over the definition of very simple economic concepts like profit and GDP.   There are 49 footnotes, but none of them makes reference to any economic literature.  They are mostly speeches by Catholic clergy who don’t seem to have much knowledge at all of the subject they are pontificating … Continue reading →

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The unhinged cultural Marxist Left that now totally dominates nearly every university in America has been hard at work trying to stamp out the small remnant (1-2%? 5%?) of non-communist faculty in the humanities and social sciences.   Their latest strategy is to organize a mob of low-I.Q. students to scream and yell, call names, and sometimes set buildings on fire and commit other acts of violence directed at a single non-communist campus speaker or professor. Ever since I began my academic career of university teaching in 1979 I have observed the Leftist faculty on campus after campus corralling the lowest … Continue reading →

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[This speech was delivered at the Mises Institute’s conference on “The History of Liberty.”] It is not an exaggeration to say that trade is the keystone of modern civilization. For as Murray Rothbard wrote: “The market economy is one vast latticework throughout the world, in which each individual, each region, each country, produces what he or it is best at, most relatively efficient in, and exchanges that product for the goods and services of others. Without the division of labor and the trade based upon that division, the entire world would starve. Coerced restraints on trade — such as protectionism … Continue reading →

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“When [the states] entered into the Union of 1789, it was with the undeniable recognition of the power of the people to resume the authority delegated for the purposes of that government, whenever in their opinion, its functions were perverted and its ends defeated . . . the sovereign States here represented have seceded from that Union, and it is a gross abuse of language to denominate the act rebellion or revolution.” –Jefferson Davis, First Inaugural Address, Montgomery, Alabama, February 1861. “That . . . the Union is perpetual [is] confirmed by the history of the Union itself.  The Union … Continue reading →

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“When [the states] entered into the Union of 1789, it was with the undeniable recognition of the power of the people to resume the authority delegated for the purposes of that government, whenever in their opinion, its functions were perverted and its ends defeated . . . the sovereign States here represented have seceded from that Union, and it is a gross abuse of language to denominate the act rebellion or revolution.” –Jefferson Davis, First Inaugural Address, Montgomery, Alabama, February 1861. “That . . . the Union is perpetual [is] confirmed by the history of the Union itself.  The Union … Continue reading →

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Several months ago the president of Loyola University Maryland, Brian Linnane, announced to the faculty that he had been thinking a lot about the Baltimore riots that took place two years earlier.  (The riots, you may recall, were a response to the death of a local black drug gangster while in a police van after he had been arrested.  All of the police involved, most of whom were black, were eventually acquitted at trial.  The rioters looted the CVS pharmacies in town, emptying them of oxycodone and other painkillers, then burned them to the ground along with police cars, private … Continue reading →

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In his essay, “Anatomy of the State,” Murray Rothbard wrote of how states preserve their power with a number of tools, most notably an alliance with “intellectuals.”  In return for power, positions, and pelf, the “intellectuals” work diligently to persuade “the majority” that “their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable.”  This is the “the vital stock task of the intellectuals.”  The “molding of opinion” is what “the State most desperately needs” if it is to maintain is powers, wrote Rothbard.  The citizens themselves do not invent theories of the benevolent state; that is the job of the “intellectuals.” … Continue reading →

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Dear Class of 2021: As you begin your college career you will inevitably become confused about the subject of “fascism,” which has been in the news quite a bit recently.  On the one hand, you will be taught that there is nothing more evil, more insidious, more despicable than fascism and fascists.  You might even be invited to become a member of “antifa,” the violent criminal gang that sets buildings and cars on fire, clubs people with baseball bats, sprays mace in their faces, throws cinder blocks through store windows, hurls bottles filled with urine and feces at the police, … Continue reading →

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“Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom . . . are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him . . . with rare exceptions, you can’t believe what any major Lincoln scholar tells you about Abraham Lincoln and race.”–Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory, p. 114 The author of the above quotation, Lerone Bennett, Jr., was the executive editor of Ebony magazine for several decades, beginning in 1958. He is a distinguished African-American author of numerous books, including … Continue reading →

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As part of the New York Times’ recent celebration of the centennial of the communist takeover of Russia (“The Red Century”) the paper published an August 8 piece by one Fred Strebeigh, a Yale environmental studies and English lecturer, entitled “Lenin’s Eco-Warriors.”  The theme of the article is that, yes, the Russian communists tortured and mass murdered tens of millions of their own citizens, enslaved the rest in totalitarian hell, and completely ruined their economy; but  on the bright side they were precursors of and role models for the Sierra Club, Earth First!, Rachel Carson, and Al Gore. The Soviet … Continue reading →

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How apropos that on the weekend of the annual convention of Democratic Socialists of America taking place in Chicago the socialist government of Venezuela is demonstrating yet again the inherent incompatibility of socialism and democracy.  It was not just a coincidence, in other words, that twentieth-century socialism was defined by tyranny, dictatorship, and oppression – and not democracy. Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek explained how socialism destroys democratic institutions in his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom.  Socialism involves the forceful substitution of governmental planning for the individual plans of all the citizens of a country, Hayek explained.  Such a system … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean, New York: Viking Press, 2017, 334 pp. The primary theme of Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean, a Duke University history professor, is that participation in American democracy by conservatives or libertarians threatens the destruction of American democracy by imposing restraints on the unlimited growth of government. She claims to have only realized this dire threat in “the early 2010s” when “something extraordi-narily troubling had somehow entered American politics” (p. xv). Rather than the usual “bipartisan” support for the never-ending growth of government … Continue reading →

The post The Latest Progressive Smearbook appeared first on LewRockwell.

After CNN was forced to retract yet another fake news story about “Russian collusion” it did what all Leftists do when caught in a lie:  It played “victim.”  It did so by claiming that President Trump’s calling out of the fake story, which CNN now admits was a fake, was an attack on freedom of speech in America.  So, according to CNN, publishing fake “news” is free speech, while pointing out the truth is an attack on free speech. To hammer home the point that it, CNN, is the nation’s protector of free speech, the network attempted to taunt the … Continue reading →

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“Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part.  Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children & descendants as those of the eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this; and did I now foresee a separation at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which … Continue reading →

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Fresh off a hate-filled rant against populism (a.k.a. consent of the governed), Pope Francis recently delivered another mean-spirited, hateful diatribe about the “grave risks associated with the invasion of . . . libertarian individualism at high strata of culture and in university education.”  He said this before the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, as reported by Breitbart.com. This is exactly the opposite of reality regarding university education:  University education has been almost completely taken over by the pope’s fellow leftists whose true “religion” is cultural Marxism, or left-wing political correctness.  He must be the only person on the planet who … Continue reading →

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