Misunderstanding Both Lincoln and Basic Economics
2024-02-23
Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experimentby Allen C. GuelzoAlfred A. Knopf, 2024; 247 pp.
Allen Guelzo has been carried away by Abraham Lincoln’s magniloquent rhetoric. Guelzo, a historian who has written a number of books about Lincoln, would like very much to believe that his hero was a champion of individual rights and economic freedom. Lincoln’s ideal for America was of a nation with a large number of small businesses, allowing people to work independently of domination by others. Slavery was the supreme denial of this ideal and, as such, abhorrent to him. In a phrase Guelzo often repeats, Lincoln wanted an America with “neither slaves, nor masters.” In this America, blacks would have the same citizenship rights as whites.
Further, Guelzo claims, the complaints
The Unknown Reasoner
2023-12-01
How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policyby John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian RosatoYale University Press, 2023; 304 pp.
How States Think surprised me. John Mearsheimer is a well-known critic of American foreign policy, and his analysis of the Ukraine war has been deservedly influential. As result, I anticipated that this book would expand his critique. The book does contain some critical discussion of American foreign policy, but, for the most part, the aims of Mearsheimer and his coauthor, Sebastian Rosato, lie elsewhere.
They endeavor to show that most of the time states are rational actors in their relations with one another, and their arguments for this thesis take them into areas that students of Austrian economics will find of great value. Their criticisms of competing
As the US Treasury Runs Out of Creditors, Its Options Dwindle
2023-11-29
Are the chickens coming home to roost for the US Treasury? As Ryan McMaken noted in a recent Mises Wire article, the United States is in a debt spiral and there’s no easy way out.
The problem is multifaceted, but the origin is profligate government spending. While it typically spikes during crises, spending is increasing at an alarming rate even outside of crisis periods. And tax revenues are not keeping up, which means ever-deepening deficits. Government expenditures spiked during the 2020 crisis, but even ignoring those spikes, annual spending has increased by about $1.6 trillion since 2019, while tax receipts have only increased by about $600 billion.
The government must borrow to make up the difference, which has led to a mountain of debt. Total public debt has ballooned to over $32
Should We Embrace the Stateless Roman Political Thought?
2023-11-29
The traditionalist author Álvaro d’Ors emphasized in his work that the political thought of Rome was essentially stateless as it had a personalistic character. In contrast, Greek political thought had a territorial focus, giving rise to the idea of the state. Intellectuals who created and legitimized the idea of the state in modernity drew from Greek political thought. To abolish the state, we need to investigate what both the Greeks and Romans said. This was the work carried out by d’Ors, and it is important to recover it.
The State and Greek Political Thought
The nation-state as we currently understand it is grounded in a territorial conception. Murray Rothbard defines it as “that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given