Reflections on the Libertarian Role in Society

2024-02-01

Breaking up with a person you have known for more than thirty years, with whom you have participated in countless conferences and co-authored a couple of articles, even if only in the somewhat distant past, is nothing done lightly. It is even harder, if one shares with this person a common standing as a public intellectual and both our names are mentioned frequently in one breath as prominent students of the same teacher, Murray N. Rothbard, and as leading intellectual lights of the modern libertarian movement founded by Rothbard.
But then: in this position, it becomes near-imperative to always stay on guard and take notice if a person closely associated with your own name goes astray and falls into serious error, and you may be compelled to publicly distance and dis-associate yourself

2024-01-30

What Is Money? Who Controls It?
Gold is money! Silver is money! Everything else is credit!
J. P. Morgan famously said this in his testimony before Congress in 1912: “Gold is money. Everything else is credit.”
J. P. Morgan was the founder of JPMorgan Chase & Co., an American multinational financial services company headquartered in New York City. It is the largest bank in the United States and the world’s largest bank by market capitalization as of 2023.
In 1973, Henry Kissinger is purported to have said (though it is disputed): “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls the money can control the world.”
Whether he said it or not, it is true. However, he would have to have been talking about credit.
Since the United

2024-01-27

As a frequent X/Twitter user, I follow a variety of accounts that touch on a number of niches: whether that is economics, finance, Catholicism, college football . . . or in this case, Lord of the Rings. A popular Twitter account that regularly shares content related to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work broke from character to offer an insight on another tweet. In the tweet he refers to, a food inspector is shown interrupting the business of a diner, which the poster laments. Middle-Earth Mixer, the Lord of the Rings account, offers insight:
The problem with Libertarianism is it leans on the old Marxist adage, “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.” Except in this case the idea is, “A few people need to die of food poisoning before we know which diners are good.”
While this may be too much