Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Forty years ago last week, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner published my first attack on the federal drug war. The previous year, the Reagan administration had unleashed its “Just Say No” program, vilifying anyone who smoked a joint, sniffed the wrong powder, or used nonapproved hallucinogens. I was mortified to see Ronald Reagan—who was elected on a promise to get “government off your backs”—double-cross his supporters with what morphed into the...

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Mere days prior to its receiving renewed attention because of an ongoing civil war, Sudan and many other African countries were (and still are) being promoted by news organizations as citadels of suffering. Viewers are subjected to heart-wrenching images: The gaunt, skeletal bodies of starved children crying out in hunger. Families left with only emaciated cows, selling sticks to produce some kind of livelihood. After observing these agonizing...

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[This article is excerpted from a 30,000-word memo to the Volker Fund, 1961. The full memo is available in Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard edited by David Gordon.] The Road to Civil War The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts: the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, andthe immediate causes of the war itself.The reason for such split is that secession need not have led...

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Not many are aware that one of the greatest works against the encroachment of the state originates from a German thinker. As early as the late eighteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) raised the question of the general limits of state activity. Humboldt wrote his Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State in 1792. While individual sections of it appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the complete...

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President Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointees have an affinity for returning to an earlier era’s antitrust enforcement, sometimes summarized as a “big is bad” or “neo-Brandeisian” approach. The most famous (or notorious) current example is the FTC’s opposition to the proposed merger between Microsoft and Activision. In their words, the merger would give Microsoft “both the means and motive to harm competition.” How could that...

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