Not long ago, Michael Lind adopted the first of these, professing to find it risible that a libertarian might pose as the champion of the common man. Why, libertarians favor the super rich!

Hence, according to Lind, the idea of “libertarian populism” is absurd. Now I agree with Bob Wenzel that the last thing we need is another term, and that plain old “libertarian” suits us just fine. But it’s worth noting that the idea of libertarian populism – that libertarians are indeed the champions of the ordinary folk, because we are champions of all innocent people against the predatory state – is not ridiculous at all, as the great champion of regular people, Ron Paul, has shown.

Now to be sure, libertarians don’t favor anyone in particular. We don’t single out the poor, the rich, the working class, the industrialists, the conservationists, the farmers, the young, the old, the black, the white, or anyone else for special treatment. We are the champions of everyone against the biggest ripoff of them all.

This was the view of Murray N. Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian himself, who said in 1977:

Too many libertarians have absorbed the negative and elitist conservative worldview to the effect that our enemy today is the poor, who are robbing the rich; the blacks, who are robbing the whites; or the masses, who are robbing heroes and businessmen. In fact, it is the state that is robbing all classes, rich and poor, black and white, worker and businessman alike; it is the state that is ripping us all off; it is the state that is the common enemy of mankind. And who is the state? It is any group who manages to seize control of the state’s coercive machinery of theft and privilege. Of course these ruling groups have differed in composition through history, from kings and nobles to privileged merchants to Communist parties to the Trilateral Commission. But whoever they are, they can only be a small minority of the population, ruling and robbing the rest of us for their power and wealth. And since they are a small minority, the state rulers can only be kept in power by deluding us about the wisdom or necessity of their rule. Hence, it is our major task to oppose and desanctify their entrenched rule, in the same spirit that the first libertarian revolutionaries opposed and desanctified their rulers two hundred years ago. [Emphasis added.]

This is why the Jacksonians (who were, to be sure, far from pure libertarians, but that isn’t the point) in 1830s America adopted “equal rights” as their slogan. We know what “equal rights” means today, of course: expropriation of one group to benefit another, with the state skimming off its usual cut for itself. But in those days, equal rights meant only that no person or group received any state-provided advantage, since state-provided advantages always come at the expense of other people or groups.

This was considered the obvious program for the common man. While the Whigs pined for a national bank and various corporate welfare projects, the Democrats believed themselves to be champions of the workingman’s cause by opposing all forms of state privilege. By and large they did not counter with federal programs of their own.

But hasn’t the state lifted up the poor? The state’s efforts to alleviate poverty have had minuscule effects when they haven’t been counterproductive. The vast bulk of the conquest of poverty that took place in the twentieth century occurred well before the federal government had done much of anything. It occurred because the unhampered market naturally leads to an improvement in the general standard of living.

Meanwhile, as the country at large endures great economic distress, civilian employment has skyrocketed in Washington, DC, where the average federal worker earns more than double the salary of the average worker in the private sector. The parasite-host relationship that exists between the ruling few and the toiling many is rarely so stark.

It’s no coincidence that Murray Rothbard, was also a pioneer in power-elite analysis. For instance, Rothbard’s essay “Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy,” published as a small book by the Center for Libertarian Studies, proposes that there might be a teensy bit more to American foreign policy than a disinterested dedication to promoting “democracy.”

Consider just a few paragraphs:

A glance at foreign policy leaders since World War II will reveal the domination of the banker elite. Truman’s first Secretary of Defense was James V. Forrestal, former president of the investment-banking firm of Dillon, Read & Co., closely allied to the Rockefeller financial group. Forrestal had also been a board member of the Chase Securities Corporation, an affiliate of the Chase National Bank.

Another Truman Defense Secretary was Robert A. Lovett, a partner of the powerful New York investment-banking house of Brown Brothers Harriman. At the same time that he was Secretary of Defense, Lovett continued to be a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter was a top Wall Street corporate lawyer and member of the board of the CFR while serving in the cabinet. Ambassador to Soviet Russia, Ambassador to Great Britain, and Secretary of Commerce in the Truman Administration was the powerful multi-millionaire W. Averell Harriman, an often underrated but dominant force within the Democratic Party since the days of FDR. Harriman was a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman.

Also Ambassador to Great Britain under Truman was Lewis W. Douglas, brother-in-law of John J. McCloy, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Following Douglas as Ambassador to the Court of St. James was Walter S. Gifford, chairman of the board of AT&T, and member of the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation for almost two decades. Ambassador to NATO under Truman was William H. Draper, Jr., vice-president of Dillon, Read & Co.

That’s just half of Rothbard’s analysis of the power elite surrounding just one president’s foreign policy team. Not exactly a cross-section of the downtrodden, in other words.

(Read Rothbard’s essay in its entirety, by the way, where he discusses some of the less glamorous motivations at work in the making of foreign policy.)

Who has benefited from the American warfare state? Who, that is, apart from those with political connections or government jobs? The question answers itself. Everyone else has suffered from the trillions of dollars looted from them so the Pentagon might have the power to obliterate every conceivable enemy city a dozen times over. We have suffered from increased indebtedness, and – because capital formation is undermined by the squandering of resources in war and in massive diversion of resources to the military sector – lower real wages than we would otherwise have enjoyed. We’ve suffered from the civilian research and development that never occurred because the brains behind it were siphoned into military research. The costs go on and on.

We can repeat this analysis over and over again, as we survey important components of American life. Who suffers under the federal government’s drug war? Not the wealthy and powerful. And who benefits? Certainly not the poor. But the tax-funded police forces that are awarded with more powerful weapons, more authority, and a seemingly endless cash cow, seem to do rather well.

Who angled for the Federal Reserve? The American public, or the bankers themselves? Anyone reading Rothbard knows the answer. It is not reasonable to expect us to believe that in just this one case, an interest group coming together to enshrine its preferences in law was doing so entirely for the public welfare.

The Fed, meanwhile, has not “stabilized the economy,” contrary to the usual propaganda, and in recent years gave rise to a housing bubble that wrecked the finances of a great many ordinary Americans. Then, adding insult to injury, it bailed out – on preposterous and indefensible grounds – some of the most reckless and irresponsible institutions.

What has the Fed’s economic planning accomplished for Main Street? The Fed’s planning, according to David Stockman, was based on the “wealth effect”: if the Fed pushed stock prices higher, Americans would feel wealthier and would be likely to spend and borrow more, thereby stimulating economic activity.

The results? Zero net breadwinner jobs created between early 2000 and early 2007. From 2000 to 2012, there have been 18,000 new jobs created each month. That’s about one-eighth of the growth in the labor force over the same period.

This is what the average person is supposed to be so grateful for?

The state, in short, enriches itself at the expense of the public it fleeces, all the while using its influence over education, the media, and culture to persuade the people that all this fleecing is good for them, that taxes are donations, and that bombing foreigners on ludicrous pretexts is “serving your country.” It urges the general public to consider the absence of the state as the most horrifying, inconceivable scenario of all.

The libertarian tears off the mask of the state, revealing it as the wealth-destroying, poverty-enhancing instrument of terror and expropriation it is. The advances that constitute civilization, libertarians argue, have resulted not from the orders of hangmen and other executioners, or the social planning of bureaucrats and academics, but from human beings cooperating voluntarily in ways that will amaze and astonish anyone who opens his eyes to see them.

And that makes libertarianism the most liberating political philosophy of all.

Although the students are widely read, they share a particular fascination with the works of Mr. Libertarian, Murray N. Rothbard, whose books and articles are far more widely read today than they were in his lifetime. Rothbard – economist, historian, philosopher – produced an astonishing body of work in defense of liberty. Why are these young people so captivated by him? Read him yourself and see.

With Mises University 2013 behind us, I thought this was an opportune moment to look at Rothbard’s major works and suggest a program for reading them. It is not strictly necessary that you read them in my recommended order, of course, but I think in terms of difficulty level and subject matter, the following program makes sense.

1. What Has Government Done to Our Money? This little book, which has been translated into countless languages, has been the entry point into sound money for more people than any other work. It’s also an excellent entry point into the writings of Rothbard, because it showcases so many of his outstanding qualities. You discover not just the range of his economic and historical knowledge but also the clarity of his prose and his ability to explain complicated matters simply and briefly.

In fewer than 100 pages, you will learn what money is, where it comes from, how government comes to monopolize its production, and how government debases it. You’ll learn some American economic history as Rothbard reviews the twentieth-century process by which the gold standard in the US was transformed into the fiat paper system of today.

You may want to read it in the Mises Institute’s special edition, which also includes Rothbard’s essay The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar.

2. Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure. This is not so much a book as a lengthy essay, but Joe Salerno, our academic vice president at the Mises Institute, credits it with getting him interested in Austrian economics. It is a layman’s overview of the Austrian theory of the business cycle — in other words, it’s a free-market explanation of why the economy experiences booms and busts. The theory has undergone some development and elaboration in the decades since this essay, but it will give you a good grounding in the basics of the business cycle and the role of the central bank in causing it.

3. Making Economic Sense. This is a punchy and entertaining collection of Rothbard’s short articles on economics, covering a wide-ranging series of topics. Rothbard is at his most entertaining when doing this kind of writing. By showing you how economic insights can shed light in so many different areas, these articles can help train you to think like an economist.

4. The Anatomy of the State. This essay appeared in Rothbard’s collection Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, and the Mises Institute has since released it as a stand-alone publication. Now that you’ve read Rothbard on basic economics and have seen the sharpness of his mind and the persuasiveness of his arguments, it’s time for something more challenging. Here Rothbard explains the true nature of the state.

I’ll give you a hint: the state isn’t a benign institution that provides for the common good.

Once you’ve read this essay, you may also enjoy the other essays in the Egalitarianism book, particularly “War, Peace, and the State,” Rothbard’s derivation of nonintervention from libertarianism’s nonaggression principle.

5. For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. Intended for a general audience, this is Rothbard’s case for libertarianism. He shows how the libertarian framework applies to welfare, the environment, foreign policy, and much more.

But Rothbard goes beyond the traditional introduction to libertarianism by extending his analysis to the provision of security and dispute resolution, and indeed to the production of all goods and services in society. Much specialized literature has been published since that time in support of stateless approaches to matters like these, but Rothbard was the pioneer.

6. America’s Great Depression, 5th ed. Rothbard wrote this book half a century ago, in 1963. It remains the definitive Austrian work on the Great Depression in the United States. (For an Austrian look at the European side of the Depression, see Lionel Robbins’s book The Great Depression.) The conventional wisdom that blamed “capitalism” for the Depression is systematically dismantled.

Rothbard accomplishes several important things with this book.

First, he explains the Austrian theory of the business cycle to the general public, and discusses the shortcomings of alternative theories.

Second, he shows that the 1920s really were an inflationary period in terms of money creation. The price level remained stable, he said, because the monetary inflation prevented it from falling, which is what it should have been doing at a time of great productivity increases. Focusing on the price level, as opposed to the level of money creation, gives a misleading picture.

Third, Rothbard’s historical work on the presidential term of Herbert Hoover makes quick work of the claim that the Depression was prolonged because of the chief executive’s dogmatic adherence to laissez-faire. Hoover was an interventionist from whom Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal would later extrapolate.

The non-specialist should not be concerned if chapter 4 seems technical or difficult. Scholars will want to examine Rothbard’s evidence in this chapter, but the layman does not need to master the details regarding the process of inflation and various features of the financial world of the 1920s in order to absorb the book’s thesis.

Note, finally, that Milton Friedman, too, says the Fed caused the Great Depression. But Friedman’s view is that the Fed didn’t do enough — hardly a free-market analysis. Rothbard’s position is that the Fed did too much, and that the 1920s, a period in which Friedman perceives no fundamental problems that should have yielded a depression, were the years in which the Fed sowed the seeds of the later catastrophe.

7. The Irrepressible Rothbard. This is a collection of Rothbard’s commentaries on politics and culture from late in his life. In these writings we encounter Rothbard at his most joyous — and, when necessary, at his most biting and devastating.

8. The Mystery of Banking. This is Rothbard’s textbook in money and banking. It’s a systematic, Austrian-inspired overview of money and banking, along with copious doses of political, legal, and economic history. If time is at a premium for you, The Case Against the Fed, Rothbard’s shorter book covering similar material, can substitute for The Mystery of Banking.

9. Man, Economy and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles. This is Rothbard’s magnum opus. It takes you from the most basic principles, involving an economy with only a single person, all the way through production, consumption, monopoly, interest rates, money, and much more. It is a systematic treatise on economics from the Austrian perspective.

This is a long book. It’s even longer if you read it the way it was intended to be read: with Power and Market. Power and Market originally formed the last part of Man, Economy and State, but the publisher feared it was too radical and urged that it be published as a separate work. In our Scholar’s Edition of Man, Economy and State, the Mises Institute has integrated Power and Market back into Man, Economy amd State, so you can read the text the way Rothbard himself envisioned it.

Again, reading Rothbard’s treatise is a major undertaking, if only because of its great length. But Rothbard is an outstanding teacher, writing in clear prose that the intelligent reader can understand. I recommend using our Study Guide, which can help you understand complicated issues and which explains the significance of Rothbard’s insights and advances within the context of the history of economic thought.

10. The Ethics of Liberty. Here Rothbard derives and defends the principle of self-ownership, and applies it to a host of important issues, including animal rights, lifeboat situations, and criminality and punishment.

Rothbard wrote numerous shorter works and thousands of articles, and edited the journals Left and Right, The Libertarian Forum, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, and The Review of Austrian Economics (now the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics). His short books Education: Free and Compulsory, and Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy may be read at any time and without any prior knowledge.

11. Economic Controversies. Formerly the two-volume Logic of Action, this is a collection of Rothbard’s articles in scholarly journals, from the American Economic Review to the Review of Austrian Economics. This book may be read either before or after Man, Economy and State. Some of the material is accessible to the intelligent reader without any prior background, while some of the economic articles assume some grounding in the Austrian School.

Can academic articles really be so interesting to read? When they’re Rothbard’s, absolutely.

Check out the tremendous scope of material covered in this book.

Let me conclude with a couple more titles, neither of which requires prior knowledge, and which people interested in American history may find especially valuable.

Conceived in Liberty, originally a four-volume history of colonial America and now available from the Mises Institute as a large single volume, was Rothbard’s spare-time project in the 1970s. His command of the historical literature is clear, and his interpretations challenging and exciting. As he indicates in the introduction, he tells the story of history through the lens of the ongoing struggle between liberty and power.

A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Period to World War II. Published posthumously, this book collects articles and book chapters by Rothbard that cover the monetary history of the US. Do not skip over the important introduction by Professor Joseph Salerno.

The Panic of 1819 was Rothbard’s doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. It applies Austrian insights to the first of the nineteenth-century panics. It was very well received in the scholarly community and received excellent reviews in the professional journals.

Don’t forget, too, the Rothbard archive here at LRC.

A tremendous intellectual experience awaits you. Enjoy!

A child will say, “I had it first.” There is an intuitive sense according to which the first user of a previously unowned good holds moral priority over latecomers. This, too, is a central aspect of libertarian theory.

Following Locke, Murray Rothbard, and other libertarian philosophers sought to establish a morally and philosophically defensible account of how property comes to be owned. Locke held the goods of the earth to have been owned in common at the beginning, while Rothbard more plausibly held all goods to have been initially unowned, but this difference does not affect their analysis. Locke is looking to justify how someone may remove a good from common ownership for his individual use, and Rothbard is interested in how someone may take an unowned good and claim it for his individual use.

Locke’s answer will be familiar. He noted, first of all, that “every man has a property in his own person.” By extension, everyone justly holds as his own property those goods with which he has mixed his labor. Cultivating land, picking an apple – whatever the case may be, we say that the first person to homestead property that had previously sat in the state of nature without an individual owner could call himself its owner.

Once a good that was previously in the state of nature has been homesteaded, its owner need not continue to work on or transform it in order to maintain his ownership title. Once the initial homesteading process has taken place, future owners can acquire the property not by mixing their labor with it – which at this point would be trespassing – but by purchasing it or receiving it as a gift from the legitimate owner.

As I’ve said, we sense intuitively the justice at the heart of this rule. If the individual does not own himself, then what other human being does? If the individual who transforms some good that previously lacked specific ownership title does not have a right to that good, then what other person should?

In addition to being just, this rule also minimizes conflict. It is a rule everyone can understand, based on a principle that applies to all people equally. It does not say that only members of a particular race or level of intelligence may own property. And it is a rule that definitively stakes out ownership claims in ways that anyone can grasp, and which will keep disputes to a minimum.

Alternatives to this first user, first homesteader principle are few and unhelpful. If not the first user, then who? The fourth user? The twelfth user? But if only the fourth or twelfth user is the rightful owner, then only the fourth or twelfth user has the right to do anything with the good. That is what ownership is: the ability to dispose of a good however one wishes, provided that in doing so the owner does not harm anyone else. Assigning property title through a method like verbal declaration, say, would do nothing to minimize conflict; people would shout vainly at each other, each claiming ownership of the good in question, and peaceful resolution of the resulting conflict seems impossible.

These principles are easy to grasp, and as I’ve said, they involve moral insights which practically everyone claims to share.

And here is the libertarian paradox. Libertarians begin with these basic, commonly shared principles, and seek only to apply them consistently and equally to all people. But even though people claim to support these principles, and even though most people claim to believe in equality – which is what the libertarian is upholding by applying moral principles to everyone without exception – the libertarian message suddenly becomes extreme, unreasonable, and unacceptable.

Why is it so difficult to persuade people of what they implicitly believe already?

The reason is not difficult to find. Most people inherit an intellectual schizophrenia from the state that educates them, the media that amuses them, and the intellectuals who propagandize them.

This is what Murray Rothbard was driving at when he described the relationship between the state and the intellectuals. “The ruling elite,” he wrote,

whether it be the monarchs of yore or the Communist parties of today, are in desperate need of intellectual elites to weave apologias for state power. The state rules by divine edict; the state insures the common good or the general welfare; the state protects us from the bad guys over the mountain; the state guarantees full employment; the state activates the multiplier effect; the state insures social justice, and on and on. The apologias differ over the centuries; the effect is always the same.

Why, in turn, do the intellectuals provide the state this service? Why are they so eager to defend, legitimate, and make excuses for the corridors of power?

Rothbard had an answer:

We can see what the state rulers get out of their alliance with the intellectuals; but what do the intellectuals get out of it? Intellectuals are the sort of people who believe that, in the free market, they are getting paid far less than their wisdom requires. Now the state is willing to pay them salaries, both for apologizing for state power, and in the modern state, for staffing the myriad jobs in the welfare, regulatory state apparatus.

In addition to this, the intellectual class we are dealing with wants to impose its vision, its pattern, on society. Frederic Bastiat spends much of his classic little book The Law on this very impulse: the conception of the intellectual and the politician as the sculptors, and the human race as so much clay.

What we are taught, therefore, from all official channels, is something like the following. For the sake of mankind’s well-being and improvement, some individuals need to exercise power over others. On our own, we would have little if any philanthropic instinct. We would commit the vilest of crimes. Commerce would grind to a halt, innovation would cease, and the arts and sciences would be neglected. The human race would descend to a condition too degraded and appalling to contemplate.

Therefore, a single institution needs a monopoly on the initiation of physical force and on the ability to expropriate individuals. That institution will ensure that society is molded according to the proper pattern, that “social justice” is achieved, and that mankind’s deepest aspirations have some chance of fulfillment.

So entrenched in our minds are these ideas that it would hardly occur to most people even to think of them as propaganda. This is simply the truth about the world, people assume. It is the way things are. They cannot be otherwise.

But what if they can? What if there really is another way to live? What if the sphere of freedom need not be so confined after all, but may expand without limit? What if the general presumption against monopoly applies to government just as much as it does to anything else? What if the free market, the most extraordinary creator of wealth and innovation ever known, and the most reliable and efficient allocation mechanism of scarce resources, is also better at producing the goods for which we have been told we must rely on government? And what if the state, the greatest mass-murderer in history, the great drag on economic progress, and the institution that pits us against each other in a zero-sum game of mutual plunder, is retarding rather than advancing human welfare?

Just how liberating this political philosophy is becomes clear when we realize some of its implications.

It means that taxation is a moral outrage, since it involves the violent expropriation of peaceful individuals.

It means that military conscription is a fancy term for official kidnapping.

It means that the state’s wars are cases of mass murder, and that the suspension of normal moral rules that the state’s officials insist on during wartime is a transparent attempt to divert the normal kinds of moral inquiries that might occur to someone unschooled in government propaganda.

And it means the state is not the glorious guarantor of the public good, but is instead, a parasite on the individuals it rules. The left-anarchists were grotesquely wrong to condemn the state as the protector of private property. The state could not survive absent its aggression against private property. It produces nothing of its own, and can survive only because of the productive work of those it expropriates.

The state is the very opposite of the free market in its ethics and in its behavior, and yet so few supporters of the market bother to examine their premises. They continue to believe the following:

(1) The best social system is one in which private property is respected, people are free to exchange with each other, and coercion is not used.

(2) That is, until the production of certain goods is in question. Then we need monopoly, coercion, expropriation, bureaucratic decisionmaking – in other words, the most egregious contradiction of the principles we              claim to uphold.

To be sure, it may not be so easy at first to imagine the free-market provision of certain goods. And anyway, don’t we need someone “in charge”?

But by the same token, it should be just as difficult to imagine the success of the free market itself: without someone in charge of production decisions, how can we expect private actors to produce what people want, especially when faced with a virtually infinite number of possible combinations of resources, each of which is demanded in varying degrees of intensity by an unimaginable number of possible production processes? Yet that is exactly what happens on the market, without fanfare, every day.

I’ve been surprised not only by the spread of anarcho-capitalism – quite a surprising development, since it runs counter to everything people are taught to take for granted – but also by the attacks on it. You’d think, since we’re still a tiny minority, no important periodical would bother going after us. And yet they have. The reason? Because they realize, as you and I do, what these ideas mean.

Libertarians have put forth the most radical critique of the state ever posed. The Marxists claimed to favor the withering away of the state, it is true, but this can hardly be taken seriously. The coercive power of the state plays a central role in the Marxist transition from capitalism to socialism. As Rothbard put it, “It is absurd to try to reach statelessness via the absolute maximization of state power in a totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat (or more realistically a select vanguard of the said proletariat). The result can only be maximum statism and hence maximum slavery….”

And without private property, how would production decisions be made? By a state, of course. The Marxists just wouldn’t call it a state. Again Rothbard:

With private property mysteriously abolished, then, the elimination of the state under communism…would necessarily be a mere camouflage for a new state that would emerge to control and make decisions for communally owned resources. Except that the state would not be called such, but rather renamed something like a “people’s statistical bureau”….  It will be small consolation to future victims, incarcerated or shot for committing “capitalist acts between consenting adults” (to cite a phrase made popular by Robert Nozick), that their oppressors will no longer be the state but only a people’s statistical bureau. The state under any other name will smell as acrid.

“Limited-government” conservatives, in turn – who in practice favor an enormous government footprint, but for the sake of argument we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt – want to reform the system. If we try this or that, they say, we can transform a monopoly on violence and expropriation into the fountainhead of order and civilization.

We libertarians are a million miles removed from either of these views. We do not view government officials as “public servants.” How sad to hear naïve conservatives speak of returning to a time when government is responsive to the people, whose elected officials in turn pursue the public good. The situation we face now, contrary to what these conservatives try to believe, is not an unfortunate aberration. It is the dismal norm.

There are two, and only two, versions of the story of liberty and power. One looks to power, as manifested in the state, as the source of progress, prosperity, and order. The other credits liberty with these good things, along with commerce, invention, prosperity, the arts and sciences, the conquering of disease and destitution, and much else. For us liberty truly is the mother, not the daughter, of order.

Some will protest that a third option is available: a judicious combination of the state and liberty, it may be said, is necessary to human flourishing. But this is merely an apologia for the state, since it takes for granted precisely what we libertarians dispute: that the state is the indispensable source of order, within which liberty flourishes. To the contrary, liberty flourishes despite the state, and the fruits of liberty that we observe around us would be all the more abundant were it not for the state’s dead hand.

We can find precursors of anarcho-capitalism here and there in Western intellectual history – Gustave de Molinari, for example, and in the United States Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and a handful of others. But no one developed it fully, followed it consistently, or assembled it in a coherent system before Rothbard. It was Rothbard who made a sweeping and systematic case for private-property anarchism, based on economics, philosophy, and history.

Very few people have either the courage or the originality to break radically with existing systems of thought, much less to develop their own. Courage and originality were Rothbard’s trademarks. Had Murray been content to repeat the state’s propaganda, a man of his genius could have taught wherever he wanted, and enjoyed the prestige and privilege of the top tier of academia. He refused to do it. Instead, he labored, often thanklessly, to bequeath to us an elegant – and massive – system of scholarship from which we can learn and to which we can add as we press forward toward Murray’s lifelong goal of a truly free society.

We can be thankful that we live in an age in which the work of Rothbard – despised, resisted, and suppressed by the purveyors of official opinion – is readily available.

And here is another side to the libertarian paradox: although our philosophy derives from a single proposition, the nonaggression principle, the development of and elaborations on that principle provide an inexhaustible source of intellectual pleasure, as we explore how the interlocking features of human society can work together harmoniously in the absence of coercion.

The intellectual class has its task and we have ours. Theirs is to confuse and obscure; ours is to clarify and explain. Theirs is to darken the mind; ours is to enlighten it. Theirs is to subject man to the domination of those who violate the moral principles all civilized people claim to cherish. Ours is to emancipate him from that subjection.

I will leave you with the final libertarian paradox, which is this: while on the one hand we are teachers of the philosophy of freedom, as long as we love and cherish these great ideas, we shall always be students as well. Continue to explore and discover, to read and to write, to discuss and to persuade. Violence is the tool of the state. Knowledge and the mind are the tools of free people.

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Ron Paul talks to LewRockwell about these enemies of freedom.

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Bill Birnes talks to Lew Rockwell about the entertainment doctor who putJFK on methamphetamine and changed American history.

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James Altucher talks to Lew Rockwell about electoral politics.

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And to promote internecine warfare among the factions. We must not be fooled, Antony Gucciardi tells Lew Rockwell.

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Russ Baker talks to Lew Rockwell about the anomalies.

• Russ Baker: WhoWhatWhy: Forensic Journalism
• Officer Collier Shooting: The “Rosebud” Moment of the Boston Bombing?
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• WHO In Boston: Bombing Story Mysteries
• The Marathon Bombing: What the Media Didn’t Warn You About
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Gerald Celente talks to Lew Rockwell about the end of the empire.

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Ron Paul talks to Lew Rockwell about what we all need to know.

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William Davis, MD, talks to Lew Rockwell about the government crop that’s making Americans fat and sick.

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Listen to the podcast

ROCKWELL: Good morning, this is the Lew Rockwell Show. And how great to have as our guest this morning, Mr. Mark McAfee. Mark has been involved in organic – I would say, truly organic dairy farming, his family, since the 1950s. He’s CEO of Organic Pastures Dairy Company in Fresno. He’s a champion of raw milk and other raw dairy products, as being good for the customer and good for the cows, too. I know he doesn’t give his cows any hormones or antibiotics or GMOs, and uses sort of naturopathic ways of treating them. It’s known as a healthy cow herd.

So your customers appreciate you, Mark, but my guess is people in the parasite central, there in Washington, D.C., don’t appreciate you.

MCAFEE: (laughing) – I think they go beyond not appreciating.

(Laughter)

I don’t think they like me at all.

ROCKWELL: Well, that’s a medal on your chest, isn’t it?

MCAFEE: It is. It’s a target and a medal at the same time. But I try to ignore them as much as possible and just focus on one thing and that is taking really good care of our customers. And we have a very intimate relationship with them. They come visit us constantly. I’m invited to their homes and churches and schools to talk to them. And there’s nobody between us and our consumers when you do raw milk. And it’s a beautiful thing because I’m not cheated out of the money that we’ve earned and the consumers are not cheated out of any of the nutritional benefits of the raw milk because there’s no processing going on.

ROCKWELL: And isn’t there just a recent study showing some very significant nutritional and health benefits for children who are raised on raw milk as versus the government milk?

MCAFEE: I think that the world “nutrition” is kind of a light statement. I think that you have to go beyond saying “nutritional” and say – we’re talking about immune-system function here, which is a step beyond nutrition.

But you’re absolutely right. There’s been some huge studies done, especially in Europe. The most recent study was an Amish study done in Europe that showed that thousands of children that drank raw milk on a regular basis had a decrease in asthma, eczema and allergic rhinitis. And that was confirmed in two other huge studies in Europe, the PARCIFAL study, done in 2006, and the GABRIELA study, done in 2010 – 23,000 children studied in the Steiner schools across Europe, finding a dramatic decrease of asthma, allergies and allergic rhinitis. So we have three huge, peer-reviewed international studies that back up all the testimonial data we have in California. And we have 65,000 people a week drinking raw milk and watching their asthma go away.

And you have to remember that pasteurized milk is the most allergenic food in America. On the FDA website, it’s right there. Raw milk is exactly the opposite, making your allergies go away. So there’s dramatic differences in the immune-system functions as well as nutritional benefits of raw milk.

ROCKWELL: Well, Mark, given all these things, and given the fact that, really, shouldn’t customers be allowed to drink the milk they want to drink, why is the government engaged in arresting people and having SWAT teams visit –

(Laughter)

– an Amish farmer in Maryland, and I’m sure there are many other horrible examples of this stuff –

MCAFEE: Yeah.

ROCKWELL: – and putting people in jail for the crime of selling willing consumers the wonderful product they’d like to buy?

MCAFEE: The FDA has positioned itself in alignment with corporate interests. If you look at who runs the FDA, if you’ve seen the movie Food, Inc., it’s very clear. It’s very clear that obviously the experts about industry come from industry. And if you’re going to regulate industry, you get the industry experts. So our administration or whoever we elected, whether it’s a Democrat or whether it’s a Republican or anybody in between, generally, kind of ignores the regulatory regime. It’s kind of consistent. I mean, with who we had under Reagan and who we had under Bush and who we had under whatever president, Obama, it’s kind of the same thing going on. So what you’ve got is the FDA being regulated by people that have favors to be done on a revolving door.

And the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments, which is the organization which runs all the processors, has their buddies in the FDA that do favors for them and keep the market under their control. Remember that raw milk bypasses the processers. Processers hate raw milk because raw milk is not processed. So the consumers get a whole, unprocessed, wonderful food where the farmer is responsible for the condition of the product, the safety of the product. The processors get no money from it. The processors have been ripping off farmers like you can’t believe for the last 50 years. And, in fact, in 1982, there were 600,000 dairies in America. Now, there’s just a couple more than 49,000. So you can see – and there’s been no decrease in the number of cows. So you can see that this is about consolidation and about market control; not about food safety. It’s not about that at all. The data does not support the argument one bit about raw milk being unsafe. Yes, there’s been some illnesses, but no deaths from raw milk since 1973. And there’s been over 77 deaths from pasteurized milk, including eight children that died from the allergies to pasteurized milk. So it’s all about market control and greed and the processers’ voices being very dominant and the lobbyists and the regulatory regime, which is in control of everything right now.

ROCKWELL: Mark, I want to mention something else about raw milk products. I buy from a farmer who, in another part of the country, does the same sort of thing that you do. Whether it’s cottage cheese made from raw milk or cream, raw cream or other raw dairy products, the butter, they’re so much more delicious.

MCAFEE: Yes. They are better.

ROCKWELL: I mean, not only are they better for you, but they taste good.

MCAFEE: That’s the first thing that people say about our products, “It’s delicious! I love it! The flavor is incredible”! Yes, it’s the first people say. Great!

ROCKWELL: So what got you involved in this? What got your family involved in it? You’re sort of – I was going to say “pioneers,” but, of course, this is the way human beings always lived so I guess it’s not really –

MCAFEE: Yes.

ROCKWELL: But, I mean, what – what –

MCAFEE: Well, I have to give a little credit to Alta Dena Dairy that had raw milk in California, a huge hundred-million-dollar business for 50 years, from the ’40s through the ’90s. The Stueves really kept raw milk legal here in California as big agricultural interests tried to get rid of it. But the Stueves and the Alta Dena brand, which is a huge California brand, went out of business in May of 1999.

I did not know about Alta Dena. I was actually a certified paramedic for about 15 years, until 1996, and my wife’s in the medical field. And we inherited our family farms, and my grandparents had passed away and my brothers didn’t want a farm, so I got the privilege of taking over our 60-acres of farm. And I didn’t want to farm like everybody else. I wanted to connect directly to our consumers. I wanted to be vertically integrated. I wanted to be organic and local and all those good things. And with the development of our farming operations, I developed a small dairy. And people – we were actually selling our milk to be pasteurized to Organic Valley. But people started showing up from Los Angeles in 2000, literally six months after Alta Dena had gone away in bankruptcy – or not in bankruptcy, but sold – saying we want your milk raw; it’s organic, unprocessed; we want your milk raw. And they started paying $10 a gallon for it instead of $2.50 a gallon. And the economics of it made a lot of sense.

And then the stories that people told me were very, very compelling. Whenever I would go on a paramedic call, I would take all my equipment and the heroes would arrive at the house, the 911 call to go save somebody’s life, whether short of breath or unconscious or god knows what, and we would always find a pile of FDA-approved drugs sitting right next to them, and nowhere in the house is there ever any good food. And that is something that has always been very compelling to me in my life. And I’m very pleased now to be, you know, preventing disease through good nutrition and immune-system function to prevent 911 calls and the use of only drugs to cure disease, which is really a misnomer. When you think about FDA policy that they say you can make no claims on anything other than the FDA-approved drug for health, that’s an outrageous, egregious misstatement of the way Mother Nature works. You know, all diseases start in the gut basically. If you mistreat your gut and you abuse it, antibiotics and sterilized foods and preservatives, you’re going to have disease in your life at some point, some kind of disease process. If you have a really healthy immune system, which is 80% of the biodiversity of your gut bacteria is your immune system, then the odds of getting a disease or illness are very, very low.

So we are really, really privileged here at Organic Pastures Dairy to be connected to our consumers and preventing disease through nutrition. And that’s kind of the genesis of how I got to where I am now.

ROCKWELL: Mark, what’s happening to the industry as a whole in the country? Is the reason that they’re stepping up the crackdown because you’re more and more successful, and more and more customers, or do they feel that they can stamp you out from the other end of things?

MCAFEE: Well, it’s interesting because there are 50 different states and 50 different states of chaos – (laughing) – in America with regards to raw milk. The national standard for raw milk is there shall be no raw milk. And that’s the FDA. You can’t take it across state lines. And they’ve left it pretty much up to the states to have individual rules and regulations on raw milk.

In California, raw milk is 100% legal. It always has been. But it’s highly regulated and it’s tested and it’s very much under the scrutiny of the regulators for sure. We’re very intensively monitored here. And it’s not something that many dairymen want to do because the last thing a dairyman wants to have is an inspector around his neck all the time. So we live with inspectors around our neck constantly here. And we’re very introspective about our food safety plan.

So where you go to other states, raw milk is not legal, then you have a regulatory scheme which aligns with the FDA and in agreement with the FDA, then you have a real problem, the fact that the FDA policy becomes state policy. In California, the FDA policy is not the state policy. We have our own regulatory regime.

So at this point, what we’re finding is a tremendous amount of success in raw milk across the United States, especially in small dairies that are locally connected to consumers. It’s very exciting because farmers are doing well with raw milk. Consumers are thriving. I think the threat is that the processors are feeling it by the decrease in pasteurized milk consumption where they’re seeing a decrease of 1% to 3% per year in terms of pasteurized milk consumption. However, even pasteurized cheeses are doing well and pasteurized yogurts are doing well because they’ve added bacteria and enzymes back into that product to make it a more digestible product in terms of life. Pasteurized milk is basically dead. And very few people can digest it. We have 30% to 40% of the population who are lactose intolerant now that can’t even drink pasteurized milk. And it being the most allergenic food in America, doctors are steering away from consumption of pasteurized milk products.

So I think there is a thriving testimonial-based, word-of-mouth back and forth on the Internet sharing that’s going on that’s supporting raw milk markets. And we saw a 22% growth last year in our markets alone in California without advertising.

ROCKWELL: Of course, we also have the factor that people don’t like to be told what not to do.

MCAFEE: Right. It’s a freedom issue.

ROCKWELL: So prohibition encourages a lot of people to try – they want to try the product that’s being prohibited.

MCAFEE: You’re exactly right. In fact, we’ve kind of seen this where there’s an inverse relationship between harassment of raw milk and its popularity. The more the government advises you not to drink it, the more people want to get it. So there’s kind of an – (laughing) – interesting thing going on there.

ROCKWELL: Well, my own view is you should always do the opposite of what the government tells you to do in all areas.

(Laughter)

MCAFEE: That’s pretty good advice – (laughing).

ROCKWELL: So that would certainly be true in the case of raw milk.

MCAFEE: Yes.

ROCKWELL: So you’re finding your own business successful and you’re able to negotiate the regulatory waters in California. The feds are not directly oppressing you. You have a successful business.

MCAFEE: We have a successful business. It’s thriving – 60 employees, 18 trucks, 400 stores, almost $9 million a year now in sales, and growing at 20% a year. I’m begging other farmers to please participate and help us in this market because in a couple of years there’s probably going to be a shortage of raw milk here in California where we won’t be able to produce enough or we’ll have to build another dairy of something. But this is a people product and it should be something that all of us participate in. It’s not something, we’re going to feed California. There’s 35 million people here. And, you know, we need to have more small, raw-milk dairymen connected and being responsible doing this.

But it is a thriving business. It’s an exciting business. And we’re not only paid well monetarily but we’re paid in social dollars as well. People come by and give us a hug and say, would you take a picture with us, and, thank you so much for the fact that my kids don’t have ear infections anymore and asthma’s gone away, and I don’t have to give the kids steroid pills and asthma inhalers. And this is something where tears come to the mother’s eyes. And that really goes to my heart, where the money aspect is not as essential at all in the sustainability of what we are – the sustainability is the social responsibility we have for our customers. And that’s something that American farmers just don’t have anymore because they’re so disconnected from their consumers. The brokers and the brands are the people that take all that away and don’t appreciate that social responsibility, the philanthropic kind of endeavor, where we get a full dose of that, and it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to have that food-chain relationship.

ROCKWELL: Mark, one last question. How many cows do you have?

MCAFEE: We’re milking about 425. We own about 600 here, including all the calves and bulls and everything, but we’re milking about 425 today.

ROCKWELL: Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and telling us about your business and the work you’re doing. And, of course, we’ll link to your Facebook page and to your website. And all I can say is keep it up.

MCAFEE: Thank you so much, and I appreciate the time.

ROCKWELL: Great, Mark. Bye-bye.

MCAFEE: Take care. Bye-bye.

ROCKWELL: Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the upper right-hand corner of the LRC front page. Thank you.

Podcast date, August 3, 2012

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Jim Rogers tells Lew Rockwell about his Adventures on the Road and in the Markets.

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Yes, no matter the State’s dastardly plans, Paul Rosenberg tells Lew Rockwell.

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The most despicable group of political gangsters in America want to destroy this site, and everything it stands for. Who are they? The neoconservatives.

Originating in Trotskyism, through their cells in New York City in the 1930s, this bunch now controls much of the American right, on which they have fastened their ideology of constant war, the police state, the welfare state, militarism, and Soviet-like thought control. The Trots sought, and seek, world power for themselves, through bloody world revolution. Trotsky even sought to have the state determine who could marry and who could have children, long before Hitler, to create a new, subservient man.

If you read their own books, they are open about their devotion to the “noble lie,” an idea they got from Plato. It is a virtue, they claim, to lie to the people, so that the right characters stay in power, under the guidance of the right advisors.

The neocons are our opposites: pro-war, pro-state, anti-market. They long for the subjugation of the whole world to the American power elite, with themselves as the philosopher kings. And they lust to destroy anyone who disagrees with them.

Since this ideological grouplet has lots of influence in the media, the government, big business, and big academia, why should they care about a site like LRC? It’s true that we do have massive traffic, and many followers all over the world, as we carry on the work of Murray Rothbard. But again, why would they worry?

The neocons are invariably backed by billionaires. Our supporters are thousandaires. So why the massive propaganda campaign against us? Why does it seem like a 1930s Moscow purge, with our side being readied for show trials?

The merchants of hate on cable TV, in newspapers and magazines, on what seems like 100 websites that Leon would be proud of, want to send us off to their version of the gulag, where we can be shut up, and our lives destroyed.

LRC has felt the force of their demonization machine before. But this time, the professional loathers are really mad, in both senses.

That’s a medal on my chest, of course, but they’ve stuck the pin in, too. Anyone who is against their bloody wars, present and planned, and who influences people against them, must be wrecked.

That is, they fear and despise our ideas, and no lie nor smear nor libel is beyond them. They will say anything in the cause of more statism and bloodshed.

Yet the forces of peace and freedom are growing. This is what terrifies the neocons. They’re weeping tears of resentment and venom. And they must not be allowed to triumph.

If you want to help LRC, if you want to turn back the neocons’ enmity and falsehoods, please consider making a donation. It will advance our ideas, cheer us all up, and drive the bad guys bananas. Now that is a good day’s work!

PS: The intellectuals of totalitarianism – the nasties who seek to wade in blood, who cheered on the police state in Boston, who want your every dime for the government and its oligarchs, who want fascism instead of free markets, who want to crush our hopes for liberty, are enjoying their time in the media sun. Help me wipe the smirks off their faces. Dollars and Bitcoins welcome!

The most despicable group of political gangsters in America want to destroy this site, and everything it stands for. Who are they? The neoconservatives.

Originating in Trotskyism, through their cells in New York City in the 1930s, this bunch now controls much of the American right, on which they have fastened their ideology of constant war, the police state, the welfare state, militarism, and Soviet-like thought control. The Trots sought, and seek, world power for themselves, through bloody world revolution. Trotsky even sought to have the state determine who could marry and who could have children, long before Hitler, to create a new, subservient man.

If you read their own books, they are open about their devotion to the “noble lie,” an idea they got from Plato. It is a virtue, they claim, to lie to the people, so that the right characters stay in power, under the guidance of the right advisors.

The neocons are our opposites: pro-war, pro-state, anti-market. They long for the subjugation of the whole world to the American power elite, with themselves as the philosopher kings. And they lust to destroy anyone who disagrees with them.

Since this ideological grouplet has lots of influence in the media, the government, big business, and big academia, why should they care about a site like LRC? It’s true that we do have massive traffic, and many followers all over the world, as we carry on the work of Murray Rothbard. But again, why would they worry?

The neocons are invariably backed by billionaires. Our supporters are thousandaires. So why the massive propaganda campaign against us? Why does it seem like a 1930s Moscow purge, with our side being readied for show trials?

The merchants of hate on cable TV, in newspapers and magazines, on what seems like 100 websites that Leon would be proud of, want to send us off to their version of the gulag, where we can be shut up, and our lives destroyed.

LRC has felt the force of their demonization machine before. But this time, the professional loathers are really mad, in both senses.

That’s a medal on my chest, of course, but they’ve stuck the pin in, too. Anyone who is against their bloody wars, present and planned, and who influences people against them, must be wrecked.

That is, they fear and despise our ideas, and no lie nor smear nor libel is beyond them. They will say anything in the cause of more statism and bloodshed.

Yet the forces of peace and freedom are growing. This is what terrifies the neocons. They’re weeping tears of resentment and venom. And they must not be allowed to triumph.

If you want to help LRC, if you want to turn back the neocons’ enmity and falsehoods, please consider making a donation. It will advance our ideas, cheer us all up, and drive the bad guys bananas. Now that is a good day’s work!

PS: The intellectuals of totalitarianism – the nasties who seek to wade in blood, who cheered on the police state in Boston, who want your every dime for the government and its oligarchs, who want fascism instead of free markets, who want to crush our hopes for liberty, are enjoying their time in the media sun. Help me wipe the smirks off their faces. Dollars and Bitcoins welcome!

The recent opening of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity was a watershed moment in American history. There has never been anything quite like it. Ideologically diverse, the Ron Paul Institute reaches out to all Americans, and indeed to people all over the world, who find the spectrum of foreign-policy opinion in the United States to be unreasonably narrow. Until Ron Paul and his new institute, there was no resolutely anti-interventionist foreign-policy organization to be found.

Neoconservatives have not responded warmly to the announcement of Ron’s new institute. Whatever their particular gripes, we can be absolutely certain of the real reason for their unhappiness: they have never faced systematic, organized opposition before.

The Democrats would see Lincoln pried out of his temple before supporting nonintervention abroad, so they pose no fundamental problem for the neocons. Ron Paul, on the other hand, is real opposition, and he can mobilize an army. The neocons know it. What’s Tim Pawlenty up to these days? Where are his legions of well-read young fans who seek to carry on his philosophy? You see the point.

For the first time, strict nonintervention will have a permanent voice in American life. It is another nail in the neocon coffin. The neocons know they are losing the young. Bright kids who believe in freedom aren’t rallying to Mitt Romney or David Horowitz, and, like anyone with a critical mind and a moral compass, they are not going along with the regime’s war propaganda.

At this historic moment, I thought it might be appropriate to set down some thoughts on war – a manifesto for peace, as it were.

(1) Our rulers are not a law unto themselves.

Our warmakers believe they are exempt from normal moral rules. Because they are at war, they get to suspend all decency, all the norms that govern the conduct and interaction of human beings in all other circumstances. The anodyne term “collateral damage,” along with perfunctory and meaningless words of regret, are employed when innocent civilians, including children, are maimed and butchered. A private individual behaving this way would be called a sociopath. Give him a fancy title and a nice suit, and he becomes a statesman.

Let us pursue the subversive mission of applying the same moral rules against theft, kidnapping, and murder to our rulers that we apply to everyone else.

(2) Humanize the demonized.

We must encourage all efforts to humanize the populations of countries in the crosshairs of the warmakers. The general public is whipped into a war frenzy without knowing the first thing – or hearing only propaganda – about the people who will die in that war. The establishment’s media won’t tell their story, so it is up to us to use all the resources we as individuals have, especially online, to communicate the most subversive truth of all: that the people on the other side are human beings, too. This will make it marginally more difficult for the warmakers to carry out their Two Minutes’ Hate, and can have the effect of persuading Americans with normal human sympathies to distrust the propaganda that surrounds them.

(3) If we oppose aggression, let us oppose all aggression.

If we believe in the cause of peace, putting a halt to aggressive violence between nations is not enough. We should not want to bring about peace overseas in order that our rulers may turn their guns on peaceful individuals at home. Away with all forms of aggression against peaceful people.

(4) Never use “we” when speaking of the government.

The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. We must never say “we” when discussing the US government’s foreign policy. For one thing, the warmakers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Americans. It is silly and embarrassing for Americans to speak of “we” when discussing their government’s foreign policy, as if their input were necessary to or desired by those who make war.

But it is also wrong, not to mention mischievous. When people identify themselves so closely with their government, they perceive attacks on their government’s foreign policy as attacks on themselves. It then becomes all the more difficult to reason with them – why, you’re insulting my foreign policy!

Likewise, the use of “we” feeds into war fever. “We” have to get “them.” People root for their governments as they would for a football team. And since we know ourselves to be decent and good, “they” can only be monstrous and evil, and deserving of whatever righteous justice “we” dispense to them.

The antiwar left falls into this error just as often. They appeal to Americans with a catalogue of horrific crimes “we” have committed. But we haven’t committed those crimes. The same sociopaths who victimize Americans themselves every day, and over whom we have no real control, committed those crimes.

(5) War is not “good for the economy.”

A commitment to peace is a wonderful thing and worthy of praise, but it needs to be coupled with an understanding of economics. A well-known US senator recently deplored cuts in military spending because “when you cut military spending you lose jobs.” There is no economic silver lining to war or to preparation for war.

Those who would tell us that war brings prosperity are grossly mistaken, even in the celebrated case of World War II. The particular stimulus that war gives to certain sectors of the economy comes at the expense of civilian needs, and directs resources away from the improvement of the common man’s standard of living.

Ludwig von Mises, the great free-market economist, wrote that “war prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.”

Elsewhere, Mises described the essence of so-called war prosperity: it “enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.”

(6) Support the free market? Then oppose war.

Ron Paul has restored the proper association of capitalism with peace and nonintervention. Leninists and other leftists, burdened by a false understanding of economics and the market system, used to claim that capitalism needed war, that alleged “overproduction” of goods forced market societies to go abroad – and often to war – in search for external markets for their excess goods.

This was always economic nonsense. It was political nonsense, too: the free market needs no parasitical institution to grease the skids for international commerce, and the same philosophy that urges nonaggression among individual human beings compels nonaggression between geographical areas.

Mises always insisted, contra the Leninists, that war and capitalism could not long coexist. “Of course, in the long run war and the preservation of the market economy are incompatible. Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations…. The emergence of the international division of labor requires the total abolition of war…. The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another.”

“The market economy,” Mises said simply, “means peaceful cooperation and peaceful exchange of goods and services. It cannot persist when wholesale killing is the order of the day.”

Those who believe in the free and unhampered market economy should be especially skeptical of war and military action. War, after all, is the ultimate government program. War has it all: propaganda, censorship, spying, crony contracts, money printing, skyrocketing spending, debt creation, central planning, hubris – everything we associate with the worst interventions into the economy.

“War,” Mises observed, “is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds; wardestroys.”

See through the propaganda. Stop empowering and enriching the state by cheering its wars. Set aside the television talking points. Look at the world anew, without the prejudices of the past, and without favoring your own government’s version of things.

Be decent. Be human. Do not be deceived by the Joe Bidens, the John McCains, the Barack Obamas and Hillary Clintons. Reject the biggest government program of them all.

Peace builds. War destroys.

The most despicable group of political gangsters in America have targeted this site and everything it stands for destruction. Who are they? The neoconservatives.

Originating in Trotskyism, through their cells in New York City in the 1930s, this bunch now controls much of the American right, on which they have fastened their ideology of constant war, the police state, the welfare state, militarism, and Soviet-like thought control. If you read their own books, they are open about their devotion to the “noble lie,” an idea they got from Plato. It is a virtue, they claim, to lie to the people, so that the right characters stay in power, under the guidance of the right advisors.

The neocons are our opposites: pro-war, pro-state, anti-market. They long for the subjugation of the whole world to the American power elite, with themselves as the philosopher kings. And they lust to destroy anyone who disagrees with them.

Since this ideological grouplet has lots of influence in the media, the government, big business, and big academia, why should they care about a site like LRC? It’s true that we do have massive traffic, and many followers all over the world, as we carry on the work of Murray Rothbard. But again, why would they worry?

The neocons are invariably backed by billionaires. Our supporters are thousandaires. So why the massive propaganda campaign against us? Why does it seem like a 1930s Moscow purge, with our side being readied for show trials?

The merchants of hate on cable TV, in newspapers and magazines, on what seems like 100 websites that Leon would be proud of, want to send us off to their version of the gulag, where we can be shut us up, and our lives destroyed.

LRC has felt the force of their demonization machine before. But this time, the professional loathers are really mad, in both senses.

That’s a medal on my chest, of course, but they’ve stuck the pin in, too. Anyone who is against their bloody wars, present and planned, and who influences people against them, must be wrecked.

That is, they fear and despise our ideas, and no lie or smear or libel is beyond them. They will say anything in the cause of more statism and bloodshed.

Yet the forces of peace and freedom are growing. This is what terrifies the neocons. They’re weeping tears of resentment and venom. And they must not be allowed to triumph.

If you want to help LRC, if you want to turn back the neocons’ enmity and falsehood, please consider making a donation. It will advance our ideas, cheer us all up, and drive the bad guys bananas. Now that is a good day’s work!

PS: The intellectuals of totalitarianism – the nasties who seek to wade in blood, who cheered on the police state in Boston, who want your every dime for the government and its oligarchs, who want fascism instead of free market, who want to crush our hopes for liberty, are enjoying their time in the media sun. Help me wipe the smirks off their faces. Dollars and Bitcoins welcome!

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus By Rick Perlstein, Hill and Wang, 671 pages, $30

“America would remember the sixties as a decade of the Left,” writes Rick Perlstein, in his fascinating and revisionist account of how the 1964 presidential campaign marked a new course of American political life. Really it was the “decade when the polarization began.”

The polarization concerned the role of government. In his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Baines Johnson articulated the postwar liberal consensus: “Government is not an enemy of the people. It is the people.” Goldwater championed individual rights and liberties, and called the government “a Leviathan, a vast national authority out of touch with the people, and out of control.” LBJ won the election by a huge margin, but over the long run, according to Perlstein, Goldwater’s vision has triumphed.

Among the book’s major contributions is tracing the origin of the Goldwater movement to Clarence Manion, former dean of the Notre Dame Law School. Manion, a man of the anti-Roosevelt Old Right, was displeased to see Eisenhower carrying on the New Deal rather than repudiating it. This inspired much work, including his effort to draft Barry Goldwater for president.

The man and the movement needed a manifesto, and it was Manion who set out to create one. He decided on William Buckley’s brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, as ghostwriter, and in six weeks, Bozell finished Conscience of a Conservative. Rather than deal with a left-wing New York publisher, Manion contracted directly with a printer. The book debuted at number 14 on the New York Times bestseller list, and by November 1960, had sold 500,000 copies.

“I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size,” the book proclaimed. “I do not undertake to promote welfare for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.”

Yet Goldwater also proposed to expand the state. His book urged the U.S. government to summon the will and the means to take the initiative against the Russians. Later, in the sort of rhetoric that would lead to his defeat, he was to advocate atom-bombing North Vietnam — a far cry from the limited government theory that had set his movement in motion.

Besides giving Manion his rightful place, the book also credits William J. Baroody, Sr. of the American Enterprise Institute with being the chief intellectual entrepreneur of the Goldwater campaign. Discussing the increasing influence of AEI, Perlstein says that “ideas once enforced at union-busting manufacturies by goonsquad and court injunction now received scientific demonstration by economists with Austrian names.”

More surprising is the role that William Buckley played. Buckley had been skeptical about Goldwater since 1959, and had even pooh-poohed the idea of Conscience of a Conservative. He early on said, “I don’t want to be identified with a total political failure,” and wrote a series of hostile newspaper columns. Late in the campaign, Buckley told Richard Clurman, chief correspondent of Time, that if Goldwater were elected, “That might be a serious problem.” Later, speaking to a shocked and silent Young Americans for Freedom convention, he dismissed the campaign: “We do not believe in the Platonic affirmation of our own little purities.”

But the campaign was most hobbled by Goldwater’s support of war, precisely the part of his platform Buckley most approved of. He promised to end the draft as soon as possible, but it was not enough. The famous daisy/atom bomb TV commercial wounded Goldwater, and Americans came to fear he would start a nuclear conflict. So, on election day, the (apparent) peace candidate won.

The entire drama — the draft movement, the nomination struggle, Nelson Rockefeller, the hopelessly biased media — is chronicled in these pages. The smears are especially bracing to recount. We are reminded of Walter Cronkite’s and Daniel Schorr’s on-air claim that Goldwater was going to Hitler’s former vacation home in Bavaria to meet neo-Nazis. Norman Mailer, covering the convention for Esquire, said the resounding cheers reminded him of Sieg Heils. Pornographer Ralph Ginzberg set up Fact magazine to recruit psychiatrists who would call Goldwater crazy. A Methodist magazine referred to its issue on Goldwaterism as a “continuation of its response to the threat of Hitler.”

Though “our own little purities” only won 27 million votes, Americans did not forget the call for freedom from federal power. And many of the astounding 3.9 million Goldwater volunteers remained active in politics. Indeed, with the end of the Cold War making possible the end of warfare ideology on the right, the domestic heart of Goldwaterism is making progress once again.

These days, hardly anyone outside academia believes that the more that government manages social and economic life, the better off we will be. To a great extent, we are still in the midst of the anti-New Deal revolution, and far closer today to seeing its potential fulfilled than we were in 1964.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com and author of Speaking of Liberty.

Lew Rockwell Archives

Ludwig von Mises didn’t like references to the "miracle" of the marketplace or the "magic" of production or other terms that suggest that economic systems depend on some force that is beyond human comprehension. In his view, we are better off coming to a rational understanding of why markets are responsible for astounding levels of productivity that can support exponential increases in population and ever higher living standards.

There was no German miracle after World War II, he used to say; the glorious recovery was a result of economic logic working itself out through market forces. Once we understand the relationship between property rights, market prices, the time structure of production, and the division of labor, the mystery evaporates and we observe the science of human action making great things happen.

He is right that understanding economics does not require faith, but there are actions undertaken by market actors themselves that require faith (and Mises would not disagree with this) — immense faith, faith that moves mountains and raises up civilizations. If we accept the interesting description of faith by St. Paul ("evidence of things unseen") we can understand entrepreneurship and capitalist investment as acts of faith.

Everyone who is in business understands this. It requires a thousand daily acts of seeing the unseen future to be in business. The reality of the marketplace is that the consuming public can shut you down tomorrow. All they need to do is to fail to show up and buy.

This is true for the smallest business to the largest. There is no certainty in any business. Nothing is a sure thing. Every business in a market economy is only a short step from bankruptcy. No business possesses the power to make people buy what they do not want. All success is potentially fleeting.

Success does yield a profit, but that provides no comfort. Every bit of profit you take for yourself comes out of what might otherwise be an investment in the development of the business. But neither is this investment a sure thing. Today’s smash hit could be tomorrow’s flop. What you perceive to be a solid investment could turn out to be a short-term craze. What you see, based on past sales, as having a potential mass appeal could actually be a market segment that was quickly saturated.

Emperors can rest on their laurels but capitalists never can.

Sales history provides nothing but a look backwards. The future is never seen with clarity but only through a glass, darkly. Past performance is not only not a guarantee of future success; it is no more or less than a data set of history that can tell us nothing about the future. If the future turns out to look like the past, the probabilities still do not change, any more than the probability of the next coin toss landing on heads increases because it happened previously five times in a row.

Despite the utter absence of a road map, the entrepreneur-investor must act as if some future is mapped out. He or she must still hire employees and pay them long before the products of their labor come to market, and even longer before those marketable products are sold and turn a profit. The equipment must be purchased, upgraded, serviced, and replaced, which means that the entrepreneur must think about today’s costs and tomorrow’s and the next day’s saecula saeculorum.

Especially now, the costs can be mind-boggling. A retailer must consider an amazing array of options concerning suppliers and web services. There must be some means of alerting the world to your existence, and despite a century of attempts to employ scientific methods for finding out what makes the consumer tick, advertising remains high art, not positive science. But it is also art with high expense. Are you throwing money down a rathole or really getting the message out? There is no way to know in advance.

The heck of it too is that there are no testable causes of success because there is no way to perfectly control for all important factors. Sometimes not even the most successful business is clued into what it is, precisely, what makes its products sell more as compared with its competitors. Is it price, quality, status, geography, promotion, psychological associations people make with the product, or what?

Back into the 1980s, for example, Coca Cola decided to change its formula and advertise it as New Coke. The result was a catastrophe as consumers fled, even though the taste tests said that people liked the new better than the old.

$29 $25

If the historical data are so difficult to interpret, think how much more difficult it is to discern probable outcomes in the future. You can hire accountants, marketing agencies, financial wizards, and designers. They are technicians, but there are no such things as reliable experts in overcoming uncertainty. An analogy might be a man in a pitch-black room who hires people to help him put one foot in front of the other. His steps can be steady and sure but neither he nor his helpers can know for sure what is in front of him.

"What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people," writes Mises, "is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way."

It is for this reason that entrepreneurial habit of mind cannot be implanted through training or education. It is something possessed and cultivated by an individual. There are no entrepreneurial committees, much less entrepreneurial planning boards.

The inability of governments to engage in the entrepreneurial act of faith is one of many reasons why socialism cannot work. Even if a bureaucrat can look at history and claim that his agency could have made a car, dry wall, or a microchip, that same person is at a loss to figure out how innovations in the future can take place. His only guide is technology: he can speculate about what might work better than what is presently available. But that is not the economic issue: the real issue concerns what is the best means given all the alternative uses of resources to satisfy the most urgent wants of consumers in light of an infinity of possible wants.

This is impossible for governments to do.

There are thousands of reasons why entrepreneurship should never take place but only one good one for why it does: these individuals have superior speculative judgment and are willing to take the leap of faith that is required to test their speculation against the facts of an uncertain future. And yet it is this leap of faith that drives forward our standards of living and improves life for millions and billions of people. We are surrounded by faith. Growing economies are infused with it.

Mises forgive me: this is a miracle.

Books by Lew Rockwell

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail] is founder and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author, most recently, of The Left, The Right, and The State.

The Best of Lew Rockwell

As an establishment site, the warmongering Politico has always hated and feared Ron Paul. Hereis their latest attack, within the context of a broader article. First, they associate Ron with traditional libertarianism, which they describe as “pro-pot, pro-porn, pro-pacifist.” Needless to say, Ron has never used pot nor porn, but he does believe in the individual’s right to decide what goes into his mind and into his body. The state seeks control over both, of course.

Nor is Ron a pacifist – an ancient charge against those who oppose constant war. He believes in the right to self-defense, but he does not believe in the initiation of violence, whether by private criminals or the state. The state has recently taken more than a million lives in its imperialist anti-Muslim wars. Ron Paul has opposed them with all his heart and soul. He is a man of peace and the golden rule, in his private life and his policy.

Next, Politico tells us that “Ron Paul epitomized to a swath of voters the caricature of a goofy grandpa who invests in gold, stockpiles guns, sees black helicopters whirling overhead and quotes Friedrich Hayek.”

Of course, Ron Paul is the most ungoofy guy you could know. He is thoughtful, careful, serious, well read, eloquent, an important public intellectual. It’s true he’s patiently invested in gold over many years, and made a good deal of money. Hurrah for him!

Ron does not “stockpile guns,” unlike the government, though he supports gun rights for private citizens. And if they want to collect guns, that’s their business. He doesn’t see black helicopters, though he does deplore the drones that spy on us for the police state, and which can kill us, too, on presidential whim. And yes, he quotes the great Austrian economist Hayek, andMises, Rothbard, Sennholz, and the others, too. He has also read the works of these men.

However, I do like this quote: Ron “recounted Richard Nixon’s infamous declaration as president that ‘we’re all Keynesians now’” – “’We’re all Austrians now,’ Paul pronounced with a sense of looming triumph, a reference to the school of economics that most values the free market.”

Then Politico refers to Ron’s “ride into the sunset.” They wish! Ron can barely keep up with the flood of speaking invitations from universities and financial groups. He is hot. And he has just announced the extraordinary Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum, to educate children K-12 in real economics, real history, and everything else they need, including public speaking, writing for publication, and social media. Talk about building for the future! He also has a new homeschool manifesto coming out to join his list of bestsellers, and he has other books in the works.

He is founding a new institution that will especially bug the bad guys. More on this later. And he is involved in television production, a new website, and a host of other ways to reach Americans by circumventing the regime. Riding into the sunset? It’s morning in Ron Paul’s America!