As the war drums with North Korea get ever louder, it’s appropriate that this week was the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. As the great Ralph Raico noted in a piece we shared this week:
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.
Ludwig von Mises, himself a veteran of WWI, understood the evil of the ever common place tactic of total war. In Human Action he wrote:
How far we are today from the rules of international law developed in the age of limited warfare! Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women or infants; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying.
As Matthew McCaffrey noted during his talk at Mises U, while technology changes the means by which war is waged, the underlying motivations have largely stayed the same. Peace cannot be obtained by conquest, but by an ideological shift of ideas. As long as North Korea remains an isolated hermit nation, it will continue to rely on military exercises as a means to establish credibility around the world. And as long as the US sees itself as a global police force, it will continue to escalate conflicts — at times tragically to the point of war, and always at the expense of its own people.
This week’s episode of Mises Weekends features Tom Woods’s opening lecture at Mises University 2017. Tom shares his experiences meeting Murray Rothbard, how Murray shaped Tom’s intellectual development, plus some valuable lessons for us all.
And in case you missed them, here are this weeks Mises Wire and FedWatch articles, covering a wide array of topics:- Sanctuary Cities and the Rule of Law by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
- The Google Manifesto — and What it Means by William L. Anderson
- Central Banks Are Hiding the True Price of Risk by Thorsten Polleit
- A Flat Tax Is Not More “Efficient” Than a Tax System with Loopholes by Per Bylund
- The End of the Nation-State by Doug Casey
- Harry Truman and the Atomic Bomb by Ralph Raico
- It’s Not Urban vs. Rural — It’s Suburban vs. Urban by Ryan McMaken
- The Plan to “Privatize” the Afghanistan War Doesn’t Privatize Anything by Ryan McMaken
- Why Government Has a Dangerous Obsession with Statistics by Murray N. Rothbard
- The Rise of Zombie Companies — And Why It Matters by Daniel Lacalle
- Tyrants of the Mind and the New Collectivism by Richard M. Ebeling
- Entrepreneurial Discovery: Who Needs It? by Peter G. Klein
- How Government Invented Our Modern, Inefficient Prison System by Chris Calton
- The Anti-Federalists Were Right by Ilana Mercer
- Jeff Sessions Endorses Theft by Ron Paul
- How To Have Law Without Legislation by Murray N. Rothbard
- Can Switzerland Survive Today’s Assault on Cash and Sound Money? Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna
