The Times (London) Friday, March 26, 1999 Two cheers for Colonel Tony Benn Nato was set up to fight a war in Europe. The Red Army invades, Nato fights back; Turks fight for Norway, French fight for Greece. What an extraordinary irony it is that Nato should not, in the event, have had to fight any war in Europe, but then chose, after the Cold War,
This article by A.N. Wilson is highly significant, not only for his case against the Balkan intervention but also for his overall perspective on the costs of war. The Independent (UK) April 25, 1999 Was the Second World War worth 56 million lives? We had grown used to having a prime minister who was ignorant, but now a much more worrying thought
Individualists are often charged with neglecting the community. This is a variant of the charge that if you strive for profit, you are neglecting the useful or if you aim for the private interest, the public interest must not be of any concern to you. The charge, however, is spurious and certainly unproven, except in a perverse sense. That sense
When Hillary Clinton explained her husband’s philandering was probably due to the fact that “he was scarred by abuse,” specifically by “the terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother,” she gave voice to a very widespread trend of thinking in our era. This is that when we engage in misconduct, we do so because certain facts in our history
President Clinton has been itching to find some way to make government a major player on the Internet. So he issued an executive order to establish a working group “to address unlawful conduct that involves the use of the Internet.” It is to “prepare a report and recommendations concerning: (1) The extent to which existing Federal laws provide a
CNN and other news organizations are reporting that eggs, among other natural foods, can now be reengineered so as to remove all their harmful attributes, but also that polls show most folks proclaim that they will not touch a genetically engineered food item. Is the idea of genetic engineering too weird to contemplate? We will be eating stuff
Socialism was shown back in 1922, in Ludwig von Mises’ book by that name, to be an impossible economic system. Von Mises demonstrated that a planned economy cannot allocate resources effectively, so that those who need things and those who can produce them are properly linked up to communicate with one another. Only in a free market is this
True Patriotism (A speech delivered at the Men’s Club of the Prospect Street Congregational Church in Cambridge, Mass., June 7, 1898) There are moments in every man’s life, in the life of every nation, when, under the excitement of passion, the simple truths which in common times are the foundation upon which the right order and conduct of life
This review of Secession, State and Liberty , edited by David Gordon (Transaction Publishers, 1998, 360 pages) appeared in The Southern Partisan . Diversity of Secession Secession is the quintessence of Americanism. Though we speak reverently of the American Revolution, most Americans fail to realize that the so-called revolution was actually a
A half century ago, one of the best-known representatives of the Austrian School of Economics, Murray N. Rothbard , wrote a short essay, a review of George Orwell’s 1984 , with the same title as this essay. I won’t attempt to recapitulate the themes of his article, or even update them in light of present events. Rothbard’s review was a battle cry
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.