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It looks like I have my reading assignments for the next couple evenings.

Thank you Dr. Herbener, and everyone else who recommended various reading material.

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Somewhat related, I remembered a couple quotes from Man, Economy, and State by Murray Rothbard.

It is a reflection on nature, not on the free market, that everyone is “free to starve.”

A common complaint is that the free market would not insure the elimination of poverty, that it would “leave people free to starve,” and that it is far better to be “kindhearted” and give “charity” free rein by taxing the rest of the populace in order to subsidize the poor and the substandard.

In the first place, the “freedom-to-starve” argument confuses the “war against nature,” which we all conduct, with the problem of freedom from interference by other persons. We are always “free to starve” unless we pursue our conquest of nature, for that is our natural condition. But “freedom” refers to absence of molestation by other persons; it is purely an interpersonal
problem.

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I used to wonder this myself (and I’m sure there are some here who can provide even greater information).

This article, though, shed a great deal of light on the matter for me, and hopefully will do the same for others.

Edit: The first article was more focused on differences between Mises and Hayek. This excerpt from The Ethics of Liberty by Rothbard throws more light on some differences between Rothbard and Hayek.

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After Tom’s comments, I had to track down the Simpsons reference…the clip quality is horrible, but I definitely laughed:

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I bought this on clearance several weeks ago and have not read it, but it looks interesting: The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898

There’s also a chapter on the Spanish-American War in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, available from mises,org.

With the Exception of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, the Spanish-American War seems to be sparsely covered in American History these days…maybe if that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be rushing to establish our Empire…

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It’s been a while since I listened to that particular lecture, but might it be the case that those 46 slaves were only the number for a given state? (For example, I know that NJ had slaves, albeit a low number, up until 1865)

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Thank you! I’m quite familiar with the phenomena you’re describing, but I had no idea that it had a name or that it had originated with Cantillon. I may now have to add Cantillon’s treatise to my to-read list.

Thanks again,

Andrew

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wiki.mises.org has quite a bit of information on it and is hopefully growing. You could try checking that out to see if it has what you’re trying to look up.

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Thank you

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Is Joseph J. Ellis a trustworthy author? I’ve been told to avoid his books because of some sort of controversy with his writings,

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I’ve read David McCullough’s ‘John Adams’, but It has been a year or two. While I enjoyed aspects of the book, McCullough seemed to be almost biased against Thomas Jefferson. He seemed to always cast him in a negative light, especially when discussing the strained relationship between him and Adams. I wonder if anyone else has picked up on that?

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Murray Rothbard wrote a piece on Reagan titled “Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy”, which was highly critical of him. I’m curious if you could comment on this article

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I haven’t made the UN a point of study, but isn’t there a part of the UN “charter” (or whatever it’s called) that explicitly states that all UN directives are still subjective to and do not supersede/repeal laws/constitutions of the member-states?

To clarify, I hope there is – I share your fear.

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Kevin: That’s incredible! I haven’t had the privilege of reading your book yet, although it is on my list for the future.

Which Federalists said that? Were any of the individuals that made that statement present during all or part of the Philadelphia Convention?

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I think that the bits of truth in his conjectures makes them all the more dangerous. I do agree that had the Treaty of Versailles been less punitive, Germany would not have found itself in the throes of hyperinflation (among other things) that led to the rise of Nazism and directly brought on WWII.

However:

America’s Second Crusade by William Henry Chamberlin (available for free from mises.org), although it focuses primarily on WWII, traces the causes of the second war through the leadup and prosecution of the first. Chamberlin cites excerpts from Wilson’s speech to the U.S. Senate on January 22, 1917:

Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed
upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress,
at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter
memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only
as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last, only a peace
the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a
common benefit.

Later, he privately observed to the editor of the NY World:

America’s entrance would mean that we would lose our heads along with
the rest and stop weighing right or wrong. It would mean that the ma-
jority of the people in this hemisphere would go war-mad, quit thinking
and devote their energies to destruction. . . . It means an attempt to
reconstruct a peacetime civilization with war standards, and at the end
of the war there will be no bystanders with sufficient power to influence
the terms…. Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there
ever was such a thing as tolerance.

Had the United States not entered WWI, the result would most likely have been a treaty based on the status quo ante bellum – the way things were before the war.

Another book that has come highly recommended to me (although I have not read it myself) is The Myth of a Guilty Nation by Albert Jay Nock (also available from mises.org).

The virus that is American Exceptionalism seems to lead those infected to think “If only America had fixed everyone’s problems sooner, this horrible part of history might not have happened.” The truth, sadly, is closer to “If only America had not tried to fix everyone’s problems at all, this horrible part of history might not have happened.”

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