War As Secular Salvation Mises Review 5, No. 2 (Summer 1999) AMERICA’S IMPERIAL BURDEN: IS THE PAST PROLOGUE? Ernest W. Lefever Westview Press, 1999, xi + 196 pgs. This book rests on a false antithesis. The author, with beguiling charm, declares himself a hardheaded realist and excoriates assorted Wilsonians and do-gooders. Yet the foreign policy
Tricked Into War Mises Review 5, No. 3 (Fall 1999) DESPERATE DECEPTION: BRITISH COVERT OPERATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1939-44 Thomas E. Mahl Brassey’s, 1998, xiv + 256 pgs. Professor Mahl’s excellent monograph helps clear up a historical mystery. As everyone knows, Americans before Pearl Harbor opposed, in overwhelming numbers, entry into
The Wilsonian Legacy Mises Review 5, No. 3 (Fall 1999) WHO SPEAKS FOR AMERICA? WHY DEMOCRACY MATTERS IN FOREIGN POLICY Eric Alterman Cornell University Press, 1998, xii + 244 pgs. In the 1930s, a coalescence took place between the Old Right and certain elements of the left. Some intellectuals in the “progressive” camp, such as the historians
“The nations must come to realize that the most important problem of foreign policy is the establishment of lasting peace, and they must understand that this can be assured throughout the world only if the field of activity permitted to the state is limited to the narrowest range. Only then will the size and extent of the territory subject to the
Investors Business Daily February 19, 1999 It goes by many names: national service, selective service, conscription, the draft. All four have been heard in recent discussions in Washington about the military’s staffing problems. The All Volunteer Force is facing its toughest trial in its 26-year history. The Navy is 22,000 sailors short of its
Russia’s ruling elite finds incessant armed conflicts necessary for its own survival. Having claimed that the intervention in Chechnya is meant to “punish terrorism” and defend Russians from Chechen terrorist bombings, Yeltsin’s government is unleashing another genocidal war against Chechnya and other Muslim parts of Russia. This perfectly
The Mises Institute’s book, The Costs of War , argues that the three wars prior to the New Deal constitute the turning point away from the ideas of our Founding Fathers. All three were won by the U.S. government: the war against the South, the war against Spain, and World War I, and they destroyed the constitutional structure of the old republic
Euphoria about the economic boom is nearly universal. We are living through a record economic expansion, brought on by factors both real (technological improvements and the opening of new international markets) and unreal (the Fed’s loose money policy and regulatory subsidies to the stock market). How long it will last, no one knows. But it will
Clinton gave three reasons for his military intervention in the heart of Europe. A quick look shows them to be models of the state disinformation we’ve come to expect in wartime. First, he says he is dropping bombs to prevent the spread of war. But this is straight out of Orwell. Escalating war does not prevent its spread. It encourages it. It
What can be said about those public figures who have enlisted in the war effort, defended the indefensible, celebrated this destruction, and even called for more? They belong on a roll of dishonor, and here is a start: DISHONOR ROLL David Aaronovitch (London Independent) Spencer Abraham (R-MI.) Christiane Amanpour (CNN) Dick Armey (R-TX) Larry
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.