From my friend AC:

"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." – Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)

He found that quote here.

Mr B recommended this one:

Update via Francois Tremblay:

Today's featured article at Mises.org, "National Review and the Triumph of the New Right," was written in the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War and a Nixon White House had already convinced many libertarians that Buckleyite conservatism was as or more dangerous than the Establishment Left.

But 20 years earlier, many individualists embraced young William F. Buckley, Jr. as a future leader of the resistance and a fellow enemy of the State.

Twenty-six-year-old Murray Rothbard was one the very few able to congratulate himself "for treating the Buckley Boom on the intellectual Right with considerable skepticism."

Rather than "a welcome newcomer to the libertarian ranks," wrote Rothbard, "Buckley is really, in 1952 terms, a totalitarian socialist, and what is more, admits it." FULL ARTICLE

Actually, that's the wrong question, since the law-enforcement lobby would make it very, very expensive to abolish the police through legal channels, and any violent attempt to bypass legal channels would probably end up having the opposite effect.

What I mean is this: if we pushed the Rothbardian button* and made all the cops go away tomorrow, how much would it cost to implement a private libertarian replacement, where person and property are protected, and victimless so-called crimes are nobody's business but the nonexistent victims?

Gil Guillory, et al. have crunched the numbers. He summarizes on LRC. Here's my summary of his summary (dollar amounts are per annum per household):

* Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, final chapter, "A Strategy for Liberty":

"The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty."

** If the payouts were capped at your homeowner's insurance deductible, it would only be $25.

A flattering IM:

Stephen Carson
9:26
Look at what hit the front page of Digg! http://digg.com/design/Why_Do_Some_Coins_Have_Ridges_Around_the_Edges
I believe I remember a much better article on the same topic by you. Oh well.

He's referring to this:

See also:

$17 "There is no possible compromise with an unsound theory; nature always steps in and exacts her penalty."

"Perhaps we are not fully aware of the extent to which instruction and education are accepted as being essentially the same thing."

"The doctrine of equality has regularly been degraded into a kind of charter for rabid self-assertion on the part of ignorance and vulgarity."

"Is it not clear that the whole difficulty lies with the theory upon which we are trying to erect a workable system?"

"The philosophical doctrine of equality gives no more ground for the assumption that all men are educable than it does for the assumption that all men are 6 feet tall."

"As far as I know, there does not exist a university or an undergraduate college, in the traditional and proper sense, anywhere in the country."

Murray Rothbard addressed the strange greed-causes-the-business-cycle "theory" in several places, always with the same straightforward question: Why should we believe that greed waxes and wanes in rhythm with booms and busts? You can't take a constant human vice (assuming you can define greed precisely and consistently enough to call it a human vice) and use it to explain anything cyclical.

What's frustrating about so many of these (generally left-wing) accounts of the "ugly engine of capitalism" is that they are not entirely wrong — not even mostly wrong. In fact, they're mostly right, except for the all-important fact that a vague and emotional concept of "capitalism" (or even "the free market") is blamed for the ill effects of the very same politically privileged system that advocates of free-market capitalism so strongly oppose.

To quote Tom DiLorenzo again, leftists are "constitutionally unable to distinguish between free enterprise and special privilege" (How Capitalism Saved America, p. 45).

Via Vanguardist:

Dear Liberty Dollar Supporters:

I sincerely regret to inform you that about 8:00 this morning a dozen FBI and Secret Service agents raided the Liberty Dollar office in Evansville.

For approximately six hours they took all the gold, all the silver, all the platinum and almost two tons of Ron Paul Dollars that where just delivered last Friday. They also took all the files, all the computers and froze our bank accounts.

We have no money. We have no products. We have no records to even know what was ordered or what you are owed. We have nothing but the will to push forward and overcome this massive assault on our liberty and our right to have real money as defined by the US Constitution. We should not to be defrauded by the fake government money.

But to make matters worse, all the gold and silver that backs up the paper certificates and digital currency held in the vault at Sunshine Mint has also been confiscated. Even the dies for mint the Gold and Silver Libertys have been taken.

This in spite of the fact that Edmond C. Moy, the Director of the Mint, acknowledged in a letter to a US Senator that the paper certificates did not violate Section 486 and were not illegal. But the FBI and Services took all the paper currency too.

The possibility of such action was the reason the Liberty Dollar was designed so that the vast majority of the money was in specie form and in the people's hands. Of the $20 million Liberty Dollars, only about a million is in paper or digital form.

I regret that if you are due an order. It may be some time until it will be filled... if ever... it now all depends on our actions.

Everyone who has an unfulfilled order or has digital or paper currency should band together for a class action suit and demand redemption. We cannot allow the government to steal our money! Please don't let this happen!!! Many of you read the articles quoting the government and Federal Reserve officials that the Liberty Dollar was legal. You did nothing wrong. You are legally entitled to your property. Let us use this terrible act to band together and further our goal – to return America to a value based currency.

Please forward this important Alert... so everyone who possess or use the Liberty Dollar is aware of the situation.

Please click HERE to sign up for the class action lawsuit and get your property back!

Thanks again for your support at this darkest time as the damn government and their dollar sinks to a new low.

Bernard von NotHaus

Monetary Architect

Robert Nozick, 1938–2002

Ask a nonlibertarian academic for the title of a libertarian book. If they've heard of any, it will be Harvard Philosopher Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the winner of the 1975 National Book Award. Nozick's libertarianism was heavily influenced by the antistatist radicals of Murray Rothbard's circle, but Nozick was no Rothbardian. His book defended the existence of the state as both inevitable and necessary to liberty.

Rothbard's reply goes straight to the heart of the matter:

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an "invisible hand" variant of a Lockean contractarian attempt to justify the State, or at least a minimal State confined to the functions of protection.

Beginning with a free-market anarchist state of nature, Nozick portrays the State as emerging, by an invisible hand process that violates no one's rights, first as a dominant protective agency, then to an "ultraminimal state," and then finally to a minimal state.

Before embarking on a detailed critique of the various Nozickian stages, let us consider several grave fallacies in Nozick's conception itself, each of which would in itself be sufficient to refute his attempt to justify the State.

FULL ARTICLE

From FEE:

The Goal Is Freedom: Ersatz School Choice
11/9/2007
"Vouchers go down in crushing defeat" That headline thundered from Wednesday's Salt Lake City Tribune, as it announced that more than 60 percent of Utahans who voted on whether to uphold the statewide school-voucher program said no. It was a big setback for the voucher movement. The Utah legislature had approved the program by one vote. But the teachers' union, which opposes vouchers, gathered enough signatures to put the question to the voters. It poured a ton of money into its successful effort to have the people veto the law. This was the tenth time in over 30 years that voters have defeated school vouchers or education tax credits, says the National School Boards Association. It may not look like a win for the cause of educational freedom, but in the long run it might be. That depends on what we do about it. More…

A NEW article by Sheldon Richman

Lew Rockwell writes:

Back in the 19th century, there were many people who wanted inflation: bankers, debtors, and the government. What a surprise! Who has an interest in sound money? Consumers, savers, and liberty-loving citizens. This is the essential conflict. Are we going to have a monetary regime rooted in robbery, or one rooted in honesty?

– "The Dollar Crisis"