Socialists and other leftwingers support taxation of the income and wealth of the well off. They say that they want to promote “equality” and “social justice,” but in fact they are motivated by envy. They want what others have. They can’t stand the thought of other people’s having more money than they do.Here is what Rob Larson, an economics professor at Tacoma Community College, says about certain very expensive apartments: “Besides the return of in-city mansions for the affluent and their cars, New York and London have also seen the growth of ‘poor doors.’ These are entrances to new luxury buildings, erected with a city requirement to include some affordable housing units for regular working people, in addition to ‘market rate’ units that sell

Democracy is not the best political system, and its defects have been amply exposed in Hans-Hermann-Hoppe’s great book, Democracy: The God That Failed. But we do live in a democracy, for better or worse, and in this system, the winner of an election is entitled to take power. The Left doesn’t accept this. If they oppose a candidate, they will subject him to venomous hatred and suggest that it would be a good thing if he was killed. We saw this is the barrage of anti-Trump attacks shortly before his attempted assassination, such as brain-dead “President” Joe Biden’s call to put Trump in a bull’s eye. I’ll cover some of these threats to Trump later, but first, I’d like to give some historical examples of how the Left operates in “democracies.”In the 1930’s, the

The attempt to assassinate Donald Trump and his heroic response to it are uppermost in our minds. We don’t yet know the details of who was involved in the attempt on his life, though I suspect that the “lone gunman” theory will turn out to be false. But the sad event offers us a chance to reflect on something that we do know, and that may well be relevant to the attempt on the former—and we trust soon to be next—president’s life: The CIA has been involved in numerous assassination plots since its inception.One of these plots is especially important in current circumstances. The CIA is implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. Jacob Hornberger has done a great deal of research on this topic and here is what he says. “Why would the CIA

[This talk was delivered at the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s conference on “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties,” on June 6, 2008, in Reston, Virginia.]The US central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans will die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign soldiers and civilians.No one pointed out that this institution would permit Americans to fund, without taxes, the destruction of cities abroad and overthrow governments at will. No one said that the central bank would make it possible for the United States to be at large-scale war in one of every four years for a full

In American culture, public schools are praised in public and criticized in private, which is roughly the opposite of how we tend to treat large-scale enterprises like Walmart. In public, everyone says that Walmart is awful, filled with shoddy foreign products and exploiting workers. But in private, we buy the well-priced, quality goods, and long lines of people hope to be hired.Why is this? It has something to do with the fact that public schools are part of our civic religion, the primary evidence that people cite to show that local government serves us. And there is a psychological element. Most of us turn our kids over to them, so surely they must have our best interest at heart!But do they? Murray N. Rothbard’s Education: Free and Compulsory explains that the

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.I’m sure that you have had this experience before, or something similar to it. You are sitting at lunch in a nice restaurant or perhaps a hotel. Waiters are coming and going. The food is fantastic. The conversation about all things is going well. You talk about the weather, music, movies, health, trivialities in the news, kids, and so on. But then the topic turns to economics, and things change.You are not the aggressive type so you don’t proclaim the merits of the free market immediately. You wait and let the others talk. Their biases against business appear right away in the

Some libertarians argue that libertarianism requires support for “open borders,” but this is a mistake. “Open borders” is the view in the existing world of states, the state ought to admit as many people who want to come to the United States as possible. Of course, you don’t have the right to occupy property that is privately owned. But much of the property in the United States is “public,” which means that it is up to those who run the state to decide what to do with it. Of course, this is an unsatisfactory situation and we should do what we can to bring about a world with no “public” property and no state, but for now the question is what to do: open borders or not?The answer is quite clear. “Open borders” would be a. disastrous mistake. The policy would subject

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.It seems incredible that in the last days, a fundamental right of the whole of humanity, the freedom of association, has been denounced by the New York Times and all major opinion sources, even as a national political figure was reluctant to defend his own statements in favor of the idea, and then distanced himself from the notion. Has such a fundamental principle of liberty become unsayable?Or perhaps it is not so incredible. An overweening government, in an age of despotism such as ours, must deny such a fundamental right simply because it is one of those core issues that

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.This was the keynote address at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s new building dedication and conference on the great Austrian economists, June 5-6, 1998, in Auburn, Alabama. * * * *We come together at a crucial time in the history of the Mises Institute and the history of liberty. This weekend, we dedicate a new home, which we see as a new headquarters of the Austrian School of economics and the scholarship of liberty. We are deeply grateful to all who have made it possible. You show your commitment to the ideas that underlie the free and prosperous commonwealth of Mises’s

Last week, a conversation with a waitress disturbed me a lot. She told me that she was homeschooling her sixteen-year old son, who is autistic, because she was afraid that he would be subjected to “tranny” propaganda and encouraged to “transition” to being a woman. Even worse, he might be put in touch with “doctors” who would mutilate him by injecting him with hormones and even castrating him, all without his parents’ knowledge. You might think the waitress was exaggerating—we all know that public schools are bad, but can they be that bad? If she is right, the schools would be monstrously evil. They would be downright satanic.She is indeed right. In what follows, I’ll discuss the “tranny” movement and what they are doing to our children. It’s a tale that will

In recent days, we have had brought home to us what “show trials” are like. They are not confined to Soviet Russia and it satellite countries during the Cold War but are a very present reality to us in America today. Political opponents of Donald Trump charged him with felonies for acts that were entirely legal. The judge in the case was a political opponent of Trump and worked artfully to prevent the trial jury from hearing testimony that would have exposed the imposture.In view of what has happened, I think it would be interesting to discuss some earlier show trials, the Nuremberg trials held after World War II, as discussed in the important book by Danilo Zolo, Victor’s Justice, (Verso, 2009)Should war crimes, i.e., violations of rights during a war, be treated

Rick Rozoff recently sent me a message that helps us understand a basic feature of socialized medicine. It is closely associated with death. Socialists complain that the free market makes medical care “too expensive” for the poor and middle class. Because of this, they propose to provide “free” medical care for everybody. Of course, it isn’t free. It’s either paid for by taxes or inflation, which is itself a cruel tax.But once the “free” care is offered, there is a problem. At a zero, or very low, price, there will be much more medical services that people demand than can be provided. Suppose, for example, that you are having back pains. Should you get an MRI taken of your back? If you had to pay for the test yourself, you would hesitate. But if it

Anti-war students have been staging protests and demonstrations on a great many university campuses throughout America. A number of so-called “conservatives” have called for the police to arrest the students. Zionists groups accuse the students of “anti-Semitism” and demand that they be expelled from school. In fact, libertarians should welcome these protests. They bring back memories of the Vietnam War student protests that participated in, brought down the war-criminal LBJ.The student protests today are actually quite moderate. They call for an end to genocide in Gaza and recognition of the rights of Palestinians who have been killed and had their land taken away from them. Let’s look at an example, the demonstrations at Columbia University, which are ongoing as

April 22 was Earth Day.. Brain-dead “President” Biden issued a proclamation about it. This said:“More than 50 years ago today, some 20 million Americans came together across the country to demand that we prioritize our planet’s well-being. They came from every walk of life and political background, and were united around a common vision: to protect the Earth and our natural treasures for future generations. Their actions that day ignited an environmental movement and proved that nothing is beyond our capacity if we do it together. Today, we carry on their legacy by building a greener, more sustainable planet and, with it, a healthier, more prosperous Nation.” See here.I’m confident readers of LRC won’t be fooled by this. Protecting the environment sounds good, if

Many Americans care about the dangers of mass immigration. Are they right to be concerned? In what follows, I’ll try to show that they are right. Immigration of elements hostile to American values does indeed pose a grave threat. But, if we are libertarians, don’t we have to defend “open borders”? I will argue that we don’t.One of the most obvious reasons mass immigration is a problem is its immense cost—hundreds of billions of dollars. A post from November 2023 that appeared on Judicial Watch explains:“Mass illegal immigration resulting from the Biden administration’s open border policies is costing American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to provide an unprecedented number of migrants with medical treatment, housing, education, and other welfare

According to “Britannica,” multiculturalism is “the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgment of their differences within a dominant political culture. See this. In fact, “multiculturalism is a gigantic hoax. The people behind it, including brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, want to impose a totalitarian tyranny on us, telling us whom we can and cannot associate with. If you are white, you have no rights; your “culture,” according to these forces of evil, doesn’t exist. If you oppose mass immigration, you are a vile racist.According to the great black economist Walter Williams, writing in 2015, multiculturalism aims to destroy Christianity and Western civilization:“President

Biden and Trump have clinched the nominations of their parties for President. Everybody is gearing up for a battle between them for the election in November. It’s obvious that Biden is “cognitively impaired.” In blunter language, “brain-dead”. Partisans of Trump are gearing up for a decisive victory. But what if this battle is a sham? What if Biden’s elite gang of neo-con controllers won’t let Biden lose?How can they stop him from losing? Simple. If it looks like he’s losing, the elite forces will create enough fake ballots to ensure victory. Our corrupt courts won’t stop them. They have done this before, and they will do it again, if they have to.I said the Democrats have done this before. The great Dr. Ron Paul explains one way they did this in 2020. The elite

Leftwing academics claim that blacks in America are oppressed. They call for reparations and affirmative action programs to help them. But these people are hypocrites and liars. How do we know this? When a black person doesn’t share their views, they act ruthlessly. Such people have to be eliminated. The ‘woke” left doesn’t care about blacks or anybody else who doesn’t parrot their views. Roland Fryer found this out the hard way.Who is Roland Fryer? He is a brilliant economist who won the John Bates Clark Medal. This is an award given to the best economist under 40 and often predicts a future Nobel Prize. Moreover, not only is Fryer black, he came up the hard way. What more could the left ask for? Fryer got an endowed chair at Harvard. He was at the top of the

Lew Rockwell appears on NOW with Bill Moyers. Lew discusses Bush, Iraq, and the US economy. Originally broadcast on March 7, 2003.
"We have to educate ourselves, and educate others about our own history, our real history, about what’s actually going on these days, about real economics, and the principles of liberty. And I think that is: if we have any salvation, it’s through that, and certainly in secular terms."

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The great Dr. Ron Paul has been right about all the major issues that confront the world today. He is right about the Fed, the Ukraine war, the FBI, and so much else. How has he managed to do that? What has given him wisdom unique on the political scene today? The answer is simple. He has consistently applied the teachings of the greatest political thinker of the twentieth century, Murray Rothbard. Ron Paul is a consistent Rothbardian.
Let’s look at a few cases where Dr. Paul has been right. Here is what he said about the Ukraine war last October:
Last week the New York Times ran a shocking article claiming that the US intelligence community believes the Ukrainian government to be responsible for the August attack that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of a

Forty years ago, I was worried. I had had the honor of working with Ludwig von Mises. But, not long after his death, the greatest economist and defender of freedom in the twentieth century was being ignored.
Some years before, I had worked for the great Neil McCaffrey at his Arlington House Publishers. One day, I was called into his office and asked, “How’d you like to be Ludwig von Mises’s editor?”
I was to correct and bring back into print three of the great man’s books—Bureaucracy, Theory and History, and Omnipotent Government—and publish his new monograph on the history of the Austrian School.
When the books were published, Leonard Read held a celebratory reception, and I had a private dinner with Ludwig and Margit von Mises. They represented an old and better

At the heart of the Christmas story rests some important lessons concerning free enterprise, government, and the role of wealth in society.
Let’s begin with one of the most famous phrases: “There’s no room at the inn.” This phrase is often invoked as if it were a cruel and heartless dismissal of the tired travelers Joseph and Mary. Many renditions of the story conjure up images of the couple going from inn to inn only to have the owner barking at them to go away and slamming the door.
In fact, the inns were full to overflowing in the entire Holy Land because of the Roman emperor’s decree that everyone be counted and taxed. Inns are private businesses, and customers are their lifeblood. There would have been no reason to turn away this man of royal lineage and his

When economic crises hit, most pundits and intellectuals never see it coming. That is because they have never learned the lesson that Bastiat sought to teach, namely that we need to look beneath the surface, to the unseen dimensions of human action, in order to see the full economic reality. It is not enough just to stand back and look at points on a chart going up and down, smiling when things go up and frowning when things go down. That is the nihilism of an economic statistician who employs no theory, no notion of cause and effect, no understanding of the dynamics of human history.
So long as things were going up, everyone thought the economic system was healthy. It was the same in the late ’20s. In fact, it has been the same throughout human history. It is no

For seventy-plus years, the case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has vexed people of a libertarian bent. His policies, extending war socialism based on Mussolini’s economic structure, expanded the American state to an unthinkable extent and prolonged the Great Depression through the horrific World War II.
Normalcy did not return until after his wartime controls were repealed and the budget was cut. Lasting economic recovery began in 1948.
And the guy who made all that happen is a hero? His picture is on the (depreciated) dime.
Libraries of books have appeared about his presidency, most celebrating his cockamamie schemes, and this is the example that has inspired the whole of American political culture. Everyone tries to be like him, and the way they try to be like

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat.
The presidency—by which I mean the executive State—is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency

[unable to retrieve full-text content]We all want freedom for ourselves, but many people have doubts about the way others might use their own freedom. Under these conditions, the state is there to help. Get enough people to favor enough restriction, and the state is good to go, administering every aspect of life from its smallest to its largest detail.

Murray Rothbard died in January 1995, long before this year’s coronavirus scare. But the principles this great thinker taught us can help us answer questions about the coronavirus outbreak which trouble many of us. Would the US government be justified in imposing massive involuntary quarantines in order to slow down the spread of disease? What about vaccines? If government scientists claim that they have discovered a vaccine for the coronavirus, should we take it? If we refuse, can the government force us to do so? These are the sort of problems we can solve if we look to Murray for help.
The fundamental rule for deciding whether anyone, including the government, is justified in using force to make us do something we don’t want to do is the nonaggression principle