The costs of the Great War were truly astronomical. As with the number of stars, the final accounting is in God’s hands. The slaughters, the treasure, the faith in some kind of order of society – all of these were costs of the war. As Wilfred Owen suggested in his terrible poem “Strange Meeting,” the culture of Europe seemed hell-bent on trekking away from progress toward something that literary historian Paul Fussell would later call the troglodyte world: a kind of Hobbesian vision, one might say, rendered in pen and ink by Otto Dix. Costs indeed. FULL ARTICLE

Back in the 1920s, Mencken was influencing a generation of educated people. He was a journalist, satirist and social critic, a cynic and free thinker, known as either the “Sage of Baltimore” or the “Bad Boy of Baltimore.” As well known and influential as he was in the 1920s, Mencken is sadly unfamiliar to many educated people today. And even though he passed in 1956, Mencken knew where America was headed long before today. Writing in the Baltimore Sun back in 1937, Mencken believed that, by now, “the incurable idiots may conceivably constitute an absolute majority of the population.” FULL ARTICLE

Marc Gallagher of www.LibertyMaven.com recently posted this trial news show.  It’s called “Freedom Watch” and is a 60 minute injection of raw liberty hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano.  You can try watching the second hour-long trial show from this link.   Peter Schiff, Stephen Moore from the Wall Street Journal, Cody Willard, Ron Paul, Tracey Burns and Lew Rockwell from the Mises Institute and lewrockwell.com all took turns as the Judge moderated. The hour of audio from the first show is available here.

Prior to the watching the show, I had only come across the Judge’s name once or twice before as by personal choice I’ve been boycotting FOX since they blackballed Ron Paul from the New Hampshire presidential debate a year ago.  I’ve decided to remove my boycott if FOX airs this show – although it will probably only apply to NFL games and Freedom Watch. Continue reading →

After all the ghastly statism of the Bush years, you might think that the left would back off from using power to achieve its aims. Instead, they have learned nothing. The left has been lying in wait for its chance. As the Obama people entered the White House, it’s as if they found a closet labeled “failed ideas of the past.” They opened it and the contents spilled everywhere. They started grabbing things and putting them in the regulatory books and in legislation. FULL ARTICLE

While all eyes are on Washington, D.C. to see what comes out of the Obama Administration and the new Democratic Congress, a different political scenario is playing out in each American state. Under the American federal system, states vary quite substantially on a number of public policies. Some states have income taxes and others do not. Some states ban smoking in all public places, workplaces, and restaurants, and others do not ban it at all. Continue reading →

Looting is a basic human behavior. The question is how to control it, or protect one’s property. There are four organizational answers: do-it-yourself, do it in mutual association with others, do it by hiring others, and do it through the state. The first three of these maintain one’s liberty to choose. The fourth does not, unless one selects one’s state freely, which is not today the case; and if one selects one’s state freely, it amounts to hiring others.  FULL ARTICLE

The question arises: What is government? Government must be defined by some quality that it uniquely has that distinguishes it from other things that are not government. That quality has to do with principles or rules that govern action. But what rules and what actions? Governments vary greatly in the scope of actions they govern, in their methods of governing, and in their relations to the persons governed. FULL ARTICLE

There’s a very easy way to fix the “federal budget deficit” and “national debt” problems:  ignore them out of existence.  To any who have invested in oppression and government extortion, the joke’s on you.  You’re not quite as bad as the thieves you financed, but you’re pretty darn bad.  And when the day comes, which is fast approaching, when all your “investments” disappear, don’t come crying to me.  You deserve it, for the exact same reason that people who invested in the slave trade industry two hundred years ago deserved to lose everything.   FULL ARTICLE

In American political culture, and world political culture too, the divide concerns in what way the state’s power should be expanded. The Left has a laundry list and the Right does too. Both represent a grave threat to the only political position that is truly beneficial to the world and its inhabitants: liberty. What is the state? It is the group within society that claims for itself the exclusive right to rule everyone under a special set of laws that permit it to do to others what everyone else is rightly prohibited from doing, namely aggressing against person and property.  FULL ARTICLE

It is regrettable that we keep forgetting what history has shown over and over to be true, because truly, it is a hard and destructive lesson to keep learning.  Perhaps it is just something that every generation has to learn for itself.  The political and cultural changes that come from these economic transitions will be key to the direction and quality of life for future generations. FULL ARTICLE