One of the persistent Clintonian themes of the 1992 campaign still endures: if “it’s the economy, stupid,” then why hasn’t President Clinton received the credit among the public for our glorious economic recovery? Hence the Clintonian conclusion that the resounding Democratic defeat in November, 1994, was due to their failure to “get the message out” [...]

Most people exhibit a healthy lack of interest in the United Nations and its endless round of activities and conferences, considering them as boring busywork to sustain increasing hordes of tax-exempt bureaucrats, consultants, and pundits.
All that is true. But there is danger in underestimating the malice of UN activities. For underlying all the tedious nonsense [...]

It’s 1993, and this means that the quadrennial political extravaganza has hit New York City. New York’s mayor, other high elected city officials, and the city council, are all up for election this year.
New York is of course a famously left-wing city, and has therefore, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, been going down the tubes for [...]

Alan Greenspan has received his foreordained reappointment as chairman of the Fed, to the smug satisfaction and contentment of the entire financial Establishment.
For them, Greenspan’s still in his heaven, and all’s right with the world. No one seems to wonder at the mysterious process by which each succeeding Fed chairman instantly becomes universally revered and [...]

The personal is the political” in today’s common leftist chant. It is also a formula for totalitarianism, for regimenting every aspect of our daily life. Relations with friends and spouses, whether or not you open a door for a female or use a deodorant, every twist and turn of life is scrutinized to root out [...]

Riots in the streets; protest against a hated government; cops arresting protesters. A familiar story these days. But suddenly we find that the protests are directed, not against a hated Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe, but against Mrs. Thatcher’s regime in Britain, a supposed paragon of liberty and the free market. What’s going on here? [...]

We are all too familiar with the phenomenon of the “spin doctors,” those political agents who rush to provide the media with the proper “spin” after each campaign poll, speech, or debate. What we sometimes fail to realize is that the Establishment has its spin doctors in the economic realm as well. For every piece [...]

We are all too familiar with the phenomenon of the “spin doctors,” those political agents who rush to provide the media with the proper “spin” after each campaign poll, speech, or debate. What we sometimes fail to realize is that the Establishment has its spin doctors in the economic realm as well. For every piece [...]

One of the ironic but unfortunately enduring legacies of eight years of Reaganism has been the resurrection of Keynesianism. From the late 1930s until the early 1970s, Keynesianism rode high in the economics profession and in the corridors of power in Washington, promising that, so long as Keynesian economists continued at the helm, the blessings [...]

The press is resounding with acclaim for the accession to Power of Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed; economists from right, left, and center weigh in with hosannas for Alan’s greatness, acumen, and unparalleled insights into the “numbers.” The only reservation seems to be that Alan might not enjoy the enormous power and reverence [...]

Man has always yearned to know his future. And, since it is an economic law that demand tends to create supply, there have always been gurus and mountebanks to meet that need, people who claim to have a special handle on all that the future may hold in store. Soothsayers, palm-readers, astrologers, crystal-ball gazers have [...]

Red Dawn, directed by John Milius.
It’s not only the Supreme Court that follows the election returns. Hollywood, too, does its bit, and movie theatres have been increasingly filled with right-wingy patriotism, like the rest of the media this endless summer. I went to see Red Dawn expecting a bout of anti-Soviet warmongering, but instead was [...]

What in hell is happening in America? This has been an Endless Summer, an odious, repellent, horrifying orgy of Patriotic Shlock. In all my years I have never seen so many blankety-blank American flags being waved, mindlessly, over and over again.
It started on that rotten last night of the Democratic convention, when the massed delegates [...]

With this March-April issue, the Lib. Forum is now fifteen years old. Apart from Reason, we are the longest-lived libertarian magazine, and, if you don’t consider Reason libbtarian . . . Unlike the fifth and tenth anniversary issues, we’ll spare our readers the saga of the ups and downs of the movement over the years, [...]

The presidency of Ronald Wilson Reagan has been a disaster for libertarianism in the United States, and might yet prove to be catastrophic for the human race. Reagan came to power in 1981 as the chief political spokesman for the Conservative Movement, a movement which took its essential modern form in 1955, with the founding [...]

Our country is beset by a large number of economic myths that distort public thinking on important problems and lead us to accept unsound and dangerous government policies. Here are ten of the most dangerous of these myths and an analysis of what is wrong with them.
Myth 1: Deficits are the cause of inflation; deficits [...]

In our famed double convention issue on the PresCon (September-October 1983), we had an article on computerism (”Keeping Low Tech”) which in its way drew as much attention (amused rather than agitated) as our lead article (”Total Victory: How Sweet it Is!”). Here are some reactions.
1. The Revolution Has Come and Gone
My brother-in-law the printer, [...]

For political buffs, there is nothing more amusing or fascinating than politics in New York. (Or, to put it another way, if politics can’t be principled, it may as well be fun.) For one thing, New York, especially “the City”, still luxuriates in old-fashioned “ethnic” politics. To wit:
1. Mayor Ed Koch
Ed Koch enjoys enormous popularity [...]

1. Post Pres-Con Notes:
More on media astuteness on the issues involved in the climactic Bergland vs. Ravenal race. T. R. Reid, in a long Washington Post (Sept. 4, 1983) article called Dave Bergland “an outspoken antigovernment activist who is considered a hard-liner even by the Libertarians’ stern standards.” (Whoopee!) “In choosing Bergland”, the Post’s Reid [...]

Swing Shift, directed by Jonathan Demme, with Goldie Hawn.
In the “real world,” we are used to the idea of an integrated, useful, and pleasing product emerging out of organizational chaos. But in the world of drama, we expect production chaos to result in a tangled, chaotic movie or play. Well, no film in recent years [...]

1. The Pits: Here’s The Beef!
In the course of a sparkling confrontation with the evil liberal and conservative Braden & Buchanan on Crossfire, Dave Bergland was asked, in their usual nasty fashion: “What makes you think you’re qualified to be President?” Dave shot back: “Well, I’m an attorney and former law professor. I think I’m [...]

IV. Bringing “Democracy” to Grenada
It is instructive to examine what kind of regime the U.S. military brought to little Grenada. Having gotten rid of the Leftist Thugs, what was the New Democracy U.S. Armystyle?
The victorious U.S. troops, in collaboration with their ally Scoon, imposed a regime of military despotism. After the war was over, the [...]

On February 1, the Bergland for President campaign, ideologically sound from the very beginning, swung into organizational high gear. The Bergland campaign opened national headquarters in Orange County, in southern California, and moving down to take over as full-time campaign manager for the duration was the redoubtable Williamson Evers. Coming down to join him as [...]

1947: I Enter The Movement
Recently, a friend found a copy of the following letter, in the files of my late friend, Dr.F. A. (Baldy) Harper. It was a nostalgic moment, because this fateful letter constituted my entry into the libertarian movement, although of course I could not realize this fully at the time. With the [...]

Up until the 1960s, the morality play purporting to explain the enormous rise of state power in twentieth-century America was a simple one. Liberals and leftists hailed the growth of government intervention as the result of a drive by workers, farmers, and altruistic intellectuals overriding opposition by selfish big-business interests. Conservatives portrayed the mirror image [...]

With every passing year, as memories of the Vietnam War fade from our nation’s historical consciousness, the calls for America to reassert itself in the world arena grow more insistent. A proliferation of national-security think tanks and conservative publicists issue daily proclamations that all the world is a battleground between the United States and its [...]

Leaders of the old right were among the most outspoken – and farsighted – critics of America’s descent into the Cold War. Having just seen the United States emerge from the bloodiest global conflagration of all time, they were loathe to embark on further foreign adventures that might entail similar sacrifices of life, liberty, and [...]

PART III
4. Macro-Reaganomics: Money
Now that the American people are inured to expect inflation, there is only one way to stop our chronic and accelerating inflation: by stopping, immediately, sharply, and once-and-for-all, the Federal Reserve’s continual creation of new money, that is, to stop its counterfeiting. It has to be done sharply and swiftly to be credible, [...]

When Ronald Reagan highlighted a quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt in his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention, it seemed like a clever tactical ploy to gain the votes of blue-collar workers with long memories. But it has since become clear that this was a mark of genuine devotion, and that FDR truly serves [...]

Part 1
One of the reasons we launched the Libertarian Forum way back in 1969 was that a number of “libertarians” had eagerly formed themselves into a (largely unpaid) intellectual bodyguard for the new president, Richard Nixon, and were given to trumpeting the President’s allegedly libertarian concerns and designs. Well, we know all too well what [...]

Law as a Normative Discipline
Law is a set of commands; the principles of tort or criminal law, which we shall be dealing with, are negative commands or prohibitions, on the order of “thou shalt not” do actions X, Y, or Z.[1] In short, certain actions are considered wrong to such a degree that it is considered [...]

That Ludwig von Mises was the outstanding champion of laissez-faire and the free-market economy in this century is well known and needs no documentation. But in the course of refining and codifying his political views, Mises’s followers have unwittingly distorted them and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United [...]

It is, as everyone knows, the Age of Conservatism. Hordes of flacks and flunkies who until recently had to be content with gracing the offices of conservative think tanks are busily jostling at the trough for cushy jobs in the Reagan administration. Every group in America is “reexamining” itself and shifting sharply rightward. Liberals are [...]

“A neutral mode of taxation is conceivable that would not divert the operation of the market from the lines in which it would develop in the absence of any taxation.”
~ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1949)
Economists have long believed that government’s tax and expenditure policy either is, or can readily be made to be, neutral [...]

I
Until a few years ago, the conservative spectrum could be comfortably sundered into the “traditionalists” at one pole, the “libertarians” at the other, and the “fusionists” as either judicious synthesizers or muddled moderates (depending on one’s point of view) in between. The traditionalists were, I contend, in favor of state-coerced morality; the libertarians were allegedly [...]

Ron Paul is a most unusual politician–in many ways. In the first place, he really knows what he’s talking about. He is not only for the gold standard. He knows why he is for it, and he is familiar with the most advanced and complex economic insights on the true nature of inflation, on how [...]

By now it is no news to anyone that public opinion in America has shifted sharply to the right and that an authentic leader of American conservatism may well assume the presidency in 1981. And yet, despite this surge, there is still no adequate treatment of the American Right or of the permutations and transformations [...]

A curious thing is happening in this extraordinary election year. The liberals are beginning to adjust to Ronald Reagan. After all, they claim, he’s getting more moderate, he’ll have to shift to the center to win the election, and he was a moderate and “flexible” governor of California for eight years. Maybe he won’t be [...]

In the spring of 1979, a fateful – and fatal – shift took place in the direction and strategic vision of our leading libertarian institutions: foundations, youth movements, journals, etc. The shift was a classic leap into opportunist betrayal of our fundamental principles.
The early, pre-1976 days of the modern libertarian movement suffered from having no [...]

Thomas Szasz is justly honored for his gallant and courageous battle against the compulsory commitment of the innocent in the name of “therapy” and humanitarianism.
But I would like to focus tonight on a lesser-known though corollary struggle of Szasz: against the use of psychoanalysis as a weapon to dismiss and dehumanize people, ideas, and groups [...]

In his monumental work The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek attempts to establish a systematic political philosophy on behalf of individual liberty.[2] He begins very well, by defining freedom as the absence of coercion, thus upholding “negative liberty” more cogently than does Isaiah Berlin.
Unfortunately, the fundamental and grievous flaw in Hayek’s system appears when he [...]

Ludwig von Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit is, quite simply, one of the outstanding contributions to economic thought in the twentieth century. It came as the culmination and fulfillment of the “Austrian School” of economics, and yet, in so doing, founded a new school of thought of its own.
The Austrian School came as [...]

America’s entry into World War I was marked by a system of repression of dissent and civil liberties unprecedented our history. The repression ranged from the jailing of thousands of critics of the war, most notably Socialist leader Eugene Debs, to banning the playing of Beethoven (a Hun), changing the name of sauerkraut to Liberty [...]

There are many odd, fascinating, and amusing aspects of the Iranian, etc. crisis which have not even been pointed out, much less discussed by the media - despite the grave and newsworthy nature of the crises. The following are some of them - in no particular order.
1. Good and Bad Muslims. We have heard a [...]

These are grim times for those of us who yearn for a peaceful American foreign policy, for a foreign policy emulating the ideals of Thomas Paine, who exhorted America not to interfere with the affairs of other nations, and to serve instead as a beacon-light of liberty by her example. The lessons of the Vietnam [...]

Libertarianism is the fastest growing political creed in America today. Before judging and evaluating libertarianism, it is vitally important to find out precisely what that doctrine is, and, more particularly, what it is not. It is especially important to clear up a number of misconceptions about libertarianism that are held by most people, and particularly [...]

Perhaps the most repellent character in Joseph Heller’s hilarious novel, Good as Gold, is one Maxwell Lieberman, the editor of a small, pretentious, once liberal now neoconservative monthly, a man who eats greedily with both hands, a New York Jewish intellectual whose sole literary output is a series of autobiographies celebrating his own life and [...]

A half-century ago America – and then the world – was rocked by a mighty stock market crash that soon turned into the steepest and the longest-lasting depression of all time. Only the cataclysm of World War II was able to pull the Western world out of the Great Depression. It was not only the [...]

Americans who grew up before World War II remember Herbert Clark Hoover as the most reviled man in public life. Whenever any of the New Deal’s court historians or writers tackled the history of the 1930s, the country was treated to a thoroughly Manichean interpretation of that epoch. The more historians and publicists worshipped and [...]

Once upon a time in America, there was a left and a right and a center, and within these clearly discernible segments of the ideological spectrum there were distinctly calibrated gradations. Everyone could find an ideological niche without much trouble, and knew pretty well where everyone else stood too. Everyone knew who were the good [...]