Is there a bigger statist scold on Capitol Hill than that shrill harpy from Taxachusetts, Elizabeth Warren?  She single-handedly puts the nanny in “nanny state.” The Okie-born Warren is a true granddaughter in spirit of the meddlesome Mathers, Beechers, and Lodges, and not the humble Massachusetts individualist anarchist Josiah Warren. Her loopy economic views make the late John Kenneth Galbraith seem as sane as a Dane, while her naïve 6th grade Civics view of government is a national embarrassment. If I had a magic lamp complete with a Persian genie who could perform all manners of prestidigitation, and I could get just two slim volumes for this former Harvard Law professor to uncritically read and reflect upon for her further education and enlightenment, the two books would be Lysander Spooner’s No Treason:  The Constitution of No Authority, and Murray N. Rothbard’s Power and Market:  Government and the Economy. Each is characterized by unrelenting logic, brilliant insights, and cogent reasoning.  In No Treason, Spooner packs more intellectual dynamite into its explosive pages than any other book in print.  Playboy called it “(possibly) the most subversive document ever penned in this nation.”  No Treason blasts government by destroying the very legitimacy of the American State.  The celebrated Massachusetts’ constitutional lawyer Spooner meticulously (with the precision of a dedicated surgeon) dissects the “social contract” basis of the United States Constitution. When he is finished, the once bloated corpse on the autopsy table is gone. The only remains are those of the heinous mass murderers and robbers which are its pretended agents. Rothbard, in Power and Market, demolishes any rationale or pretext for economic intervention into civil society by the government. In one fell blow, he forever separates the market economy from the coercive apparatus of the State.  The very notions of “political economy,” “public policy” or similar parasitism become obsolete.  Government is revealed, as Spooner earlier demonstrated, a criminal band of murderers, looters, thugs, and thieves.

The Best of Charles Burris