As yesterday’s Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony demonstrated, the word “freedom,” as it is used in Mordor, actually means “the power and the glory of the US state.” David Frum approves of the goon show, as John Cooke reminds me. David Shuster doesn’t (thanks to Kent Snyder). But even when it is draped around the necks of good men and women from the productive world, the PMF is an attempt to capture some of their reputation for the government, to disguise just slightly that it is essentially a “band of thieves writ large,” as Murray Rothbard put it. That is the motive: to honor the state, not them.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.