Many Americans had grown weary of the New Deal during the second term of President Roosevelt’s administration. More and more people realized that their president had brought about a revolution in the American system of government. But the majority gave FDR a third term. The president promised to keep America out of the new European war that would eventually turn into World War II. When Roosevelt went back on his word, the majority started to wane. The population still stood behind the commander in chief in a time of war, but the disenchantment with New Deal policies became ever more manifest. People started listening to critical voices, and these voices could now be heard everywhere. FULL ARTICLE

Top: Isabel Paterson, Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn, Rose Wilder Lane Bottom: Henry Hazlitt, Benjamin Anderson, Frank Chodorov, and John Chamberlain

Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

It was through the 1990s manifestation of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and its magazine The Freeman that I became an economic libertarian.

Half a century earlier, FEE introduced a young Murray Rothbard, who was already an advocate of economic laissez faire, to the larger libertarian movement and to a far broader, more penetrating, and radical libertarianism.

“One of the most important influences upon me,” writes Rothbard, “was Baldy Harper, whose quiet and gentle hospitality toward young newcomers attracted many of us to the pure libertarian creed that he espoused and exemplified — a creed all the more effective for his stressing the philosophical aspects of liberty even more than the narrowly economic.” [emphasis added]

Even more influential was Frank Chodorov: “that noble, courageous, candid, and spontaneous giant of a man who compromised not one iota in his eloquent denunciations of our enemy the State — was my entree to uncompromising libertarianism.”

This doesn’t sound like the FEE I knew, which proudly displayed a photograph of Ronald Reagan reading The Freeman.

What happened?

[Read the rest »]

Barbara Tuchman believed that historical facts had to precede historical theory, and that narrative was more important (or more compelling, anyway) than analysis. (She talks about historiography in her book Practicing History.) I hope to write about these points at a later date, but I mention them now to say that A Distant Mirror is far from a libertarian perspective on 14th-century history, but does contain plenty of facts of interest to "our side," e.g.,

When shortly after Easter the Duke of Lancaster left England with a large force in 200 ships to conquer the throne of Castile, the French opportunity was at hand. Information about each other’s movements was known through French and English fishermen, who, ignoring hostilities, came to each other’s aid at sea and exchanged catches, keeping trans-Channel communication open.

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 20: "A Second Norman Invasion," p. 424.

I like the image of peace and cooperation persisting through commerce, defiant of the ruling war parties at home.

Murray N. Rothbard

From chapter 7 (today’s daily article at Mises.org) of The Betrayal of the American Right:

The winter of 1949–50, in fact, witnessed the two most exciting and shattering intellectual events of my life: my discovery of "Austrian" economics, and my conversion to individualist anarchism.

[…]

My conversion to anarchism was a simple exercise in logic. I had engaged continually in friendly arguments about laissez-faire with left-liberal friends from graduate school. While condemning taxation, I had still felt that taxation was required for the provision of police and judicial protection and for that only. One night two friends and I had one of our usual lengthy discussions, seemingly unprofitable; but this time when they’d left, I felt that for once something vital had actually been said. As I thought back on the discussion, I realized that my friends, as liberals, had posed the following challenge to my laissez-faire position:

They: What is the legitimate basis for your laissez-faire government, for this political entity confined solely to defending person and property?

I: Well, the people get together and decide to establish such a government.

They: But if "the people" can do that, why can’t they do exactly the same thing and get together to choose a government that will build steel plants, dams, etc.?

I realized in a flash that their logic was impeccable, that laissez-faire was logically untenable, and that either I had to become a liberal, or move onward into anarchism. I became an anarchist.

Furthermore, I saw the total incompatibility of the insights of Oppenheimer and Nock on the nature of the State as conquest, with the vague "social contract" basis that I had been postulating for a laissez-faire government. I saw that the only genuine contract had to be an individual’s specifically disposing of or using his own property.

Naturally, the anarchism I had adopted was individualist and free-market, a logical extension of laissez-faire, and not the woolly communalism that marked most of contemporary anarchist thought.