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Playing Politics Can Be Fun until It Unleashes Hell – Article by Joey Clark

Playing Politics Can Be Fun until It Unleashes Hell – Article by Joey Clark

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The New Renaissance HatJoey Clark
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Most politicians and their followers are not cynical enough about politics. They hate the players but not the game. Unlike me, they are cynical sentimentalists, i.e. they idealize politics yet are cynical towards any suggestion human beings should be set free from political control.

Though it may smack of paradox, I consider myself a hopeful cynic – hopeful in man’s spirit but not his politics. Accordingly, my political cynicism flows from my disappointed sentimentality.

Most politicians are not cynical enough about politics. They hate the players but not the game. As Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windermere’s Fan, a cynic is “a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing” and a sentimentalist “is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.” Together the two bring harmony.

Torn apart, they are blind in their own unique way, and in this way, the 2016 political season has rendered much of the American populace sightless. Some wish to present this presidential election as a clear-cut contest between cynical pachyderms and sentimental jackasses, but the truth, to steal another line from Wilde, is rarely so pure and never so simple.

As much as they will deny it, political factions are motivated by a mix of cynicism and sentimentality, sometimes within the very same individuals.

Even the most sentimental nincompoops – those who shed tears or fall into fits of hosannas upon hearing the most platitudinous political speech – turn cynical and stone-faced when confronted by their political opponents.

Even the most cynical demagogues – those who spit piss and vinegar in response to the most innocuous statements from their enemies – turn sentimental and misty-eyed in the presence of a president they love.

It seems one politico’s hopes are another politico’s fears. They appraise their enemy’s price as too high yet see absurd value in their champions.

The Donald’s Sentimentality

For example, even Donald Trump is not cynical enough about politics. Trump may very well be cynical and downright churlish towards, well, almost anyone (even babies) on any given day, but he is certainly a believer in the need for strong government leadership. Trump has, indeed, boosted his popularity by stoking the flames of resentment, but the essence of this resentment is the betrayed sentimentality of “the people.”

Trump and his supporters idealize America just as much as the next group. Holding true to a golden age image of the country, they are disappointed by an ever-changing world that continually shatters their “perfect” picture of the nation. They are cynical of what they see as “un-American,” and they have hitched their hopes to Trump’s politics to save their culture as they see it.

Thus, Trump’s slogan may not be “Burn America Down” as Democrats would have you believe, but he is certainly a flaming nationalist. His program may not be great for many people living in America, but “America” is, indeed, the ultimate standard of good and evil on the Trump train. One cannot be cynical about politics qua politics and a nationalist at the same time. No, nationalism is for the teary-eyed evangelicals and patriotic bomb throwers, Trump being the latter. But how about the former?

Enter Hillary Clinton.

Hillary’s Cynicism

Hillary Clinton, like most progressives, prides herself on her forward-looking and optimistic approach. She and her ilk apparently claim to loathe cynicism. As Senator Cory Booker said at the Democratic National Convention surrounded by a friendly mob of fellow sentimentalists, “Cynicism is a refuge for cowards.” Of course, by “cynicism” Cory, Hillary, and their do-gooder cronies mean anyone who does not wish to consent to their progressive plans to save the world. To hear them speak about peace, love, and community one would think such things were impossible without the imposition of the state.

What makes progressives so sentimental about people using state power yet cynical towards people acting voluntarily, I will never truly know.What makes progressives so sentimental about people using state power yet cynical towards people acting voluntarily, I will never truly know, but I suspect they do not trust the motives of many of their fellow men, especially not Donald Trump. Their assessment of Trump may be correct, but their appraisal of their own sentiments is utterly lacking. Their worship at the altar of state power seems to have turned them blind to the ironies of the “progressive” history and project.

For instance, of all the ways Hillary could take down Trump’s fear-mongering, she chose to say this in her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention:“Well, a great Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than eighty years ago, during a much more perilous time. ’The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’”

Yes, Hillary, how wise of you to quote a man who brought us Japanese internment camps, turned away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, and set the price of gold based on “lucky numbers.” But, I suppose, since FDR is a demigod in the progressive civic religion, his cynicism and quackery can be overlooked, as can the ugly, cynical history of progressive policies such as the minimum wage.

Again, if only Hillary, Donald and their respective acolytes were more cynical about politics qua politics, we would all be better off. But what about the most cynical bunch in American politics today, the alt-right meme team?  How could a group of folks who “pretend” to be Nazis ever be helped by more political cynicism?

And why would one ever want to pretend to be a Nazi anyway?

Pretend Nazis Need Cynicism Too

Enter Charles Bukowski:

“At L.A. City College just before World War II, I posed as a Nazi. I hardly knew Hitler from Hercules and cared less. It was just that sitting in class and hearing all the patriots preach how we should go over and do the beast in, I grew bored. I decided to become the opposition. I didn’t even bother to read up on Adolf, I simply spouted anything that I felt was evil or maniacal.

However, I really didn’t have any political beliefs. It was a way of floating free.”

This is how Bukowski’s short story, “Politics”, begins, and his reasons for his posing as a Nazi – ”boredom” and “floating free” – sound quite similar to those prescribed to the alt-right “meme team” by that frivolous troll, Milo Yiannopoulos, and his colleague, Allum Bokhari, in their crash course on the alt-right:

These young rebels, a subset of the alt-right, aren’t drawn to it because of an intellectual awakening, or because they’re instinctively conservative. Ironically, they’re drawn to the alt-right for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s: because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand.

If this parallel continues into the future, things will probably not end well, at least not with mere lulz.

As Bukowski later relays in the story, his Nazi antics earned him disciples, but his acolytes took the whole charade much more seriously than he. After stumbling upon a Communist speaker outside of campus, one of his followers approached him with a bag of rotten tomatoes. Upon being told to put the tomatoes away, his follower said, “I wish they were hand grenades.”

“It occurred to me suddenly that my disciples hadn’t been listening to the speaker, or even if they had been, nothing he had said would matter,” writes Bukowski, “Their minds were made up. Most of the world was like that… I lost control of my disciples that day, and walked away as they started hurling their rotten tomatoes.”

The alt-right don’t want to get rid of the establishment; they want to replace it.I must hand it to the alt-right trolls – they are quite creative and prolific and, at times, hilarious in their cynical pose – but there is a difference between political cynicism and a general cynicism about the culture at large. One must be careful not to let those rotten tomatoes turn into hand grenades. Sadly, the alt-right purveyors of “ironic bigotry” may think they are simply having a little cynical fun, but their actions seem directed only towards the political establishment without rejecting the whole paradigm of political action.

They don’t want to get rid of the establishment; they want to replace it. In particular, if one is to fight, say, the excesses of political correctness for the sake of liberty (a worthy endeavor in my opinion,) the focus should be on neutering the “political” aspects of that equation rather than letting basic human decency fall into the abyss of reactionary nonsense or a babyish nihilism, all the while serving the ends of just another political faction.

Politics Pollutes Culture

Yes, politics may often be downstream from culture as Andrew Breitbart said, but it can also pollute the river of culture if allowed to become too permeating. Once politics comes to define a people, all that is left is an impending battle over whose culture will be imposed through the power of the state. In the face of such a looming war, it is understandable that people often despair only to hurl invective and material threats towards “the others” seen as the source of their angst. In such a world dominated by political power, it is understandable that politicos see anyone who is cynical about their projects as a threat to human solidarity.

But the true root of the problem is not the other nor political cynicism; it is the lust to dominate and control others within each of us. The tyrant in you is the tyrant in me, and if we are not careful, even our so-called reactions against tyranny can mutate into movements to destroy something beautiful for destruction’s sake.

What if we all become hopeful cynics – cynical of man’s lust to dominate his fellows, yet lovers of man all the same? That said, we should recognize even our enemies’ capacity for creative action and fellowship in their darkest hours. If such qualities can provide solace, even in sardonic and sadistic forms, to a select few in their most despairing moments, what can creative action and fellowship provide when we direct our cynical pose toward politics in general instead of just our opponents? What if we all become hopeful cynics – cynical of man’s lust to dominate his fellows, yet lovers of man all the same?

If I am being honest, I do not know what this pose would bring about, but this is exactly why hope is a virtue. Bukowski might disagree; he wrote in his short story, “I promise you, this will hardly be the last war. As soon as one enemy is eliminated somehow another is found. It’s endless and meaningless. There’s no such thing as a good war or a bad war.” Maybe he’s right, and the war of all against all is inevitable, but I hope not. Nor do I wish to save the world. That is much too idealistic. As our dirty old man poet says elsewhere in his novel Women, “You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”

Maybe, just maybe, each of us can first save ourselves and then others, one by one, with a hope in the uncertain beyond for man’s society if not his politics.

Joey ClarkJoey Clark

Joey Clark is a budding wordsmith and liberty lover. He blogs under the heading “The Libertarian Fool” at joeyclark.liberty.me. Follow him on Facebook.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

A Date That Should Live in Infamy – Article by Sanford Ikeda

A Date That Should Live in Infamy – Article by Sanford Ikeda

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The New Renaissance HatSanford Ikeda
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Never forget Executive Order 9066

On February 19, 1942 — seventy-four years ago — Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. With the stroke of his pen, the man who had earlier snubbed Jesse Owens after the Berlin Olympics used his executive powers to order the imprisonment of over 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry (as well as thousands of German and Italian ancestry) for the duration of World War II.

internment-2Most of the internees were natural-born American citizens, whose “crime” was having a parent or merely a grandparent with Japanese blood. It was an act of naked, aggressive racism that damaged people and families, including my own, for generations.

internmentIt happened here. With the NDAA as the law of the land, and with war-mongering and xenophobia, it could happen here again. We must oppose such collectivism and stand for freedom for all.

On a related note, if you think Apple’s current battle with the FBI over iPhone security is based on empty fears of civil-liberties violations, think again. After decades of denials, the US Census Bureau recently admitted that it provided the Treasury Department with the names and addresses of Japanese-Americans who were later tracked down and herded into concentration camps.

Sanford (Sandy) Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Waking Up to the Reality of Fascism – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Waking Up to the Reality of Fascism – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

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The New Renaissance HatJeffrey A. Tucker
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The great extant threat to liberty is nativist authoritarianism

Donald Trump is on a roll, breaking new ground in uses for [centralized] power.

Closing the internet? Sure. “We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people… We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some ways.”

Registering Muslims? Lots of people thought he misspoke. But he later clarified: “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. We should have a lot of systems.”

Why not just bar all Muslims at the border? Indeed, and to the massive cheers of his supporters, Trump has called for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Internment camps? Trump cites the FDR precedent: Italians, Germans, and Japanese “couldn’t go five miles from their homes. They weren’t allowed to use radios, flashlights. I mean, you know, take a look at what FDR did many years ago and he’s one of the most highly respected presidents.”

Rounding up millions of people? He’ll create a “deportation force” to hunt down and remove 11 million illegal immigrants.

Killing wives and children? That too. “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.”

Political Vocabulary

This litany of ideas has finally prompted mainstream recognition of the incredibly obvious: If Donald Trump has an ideology, it is best described as fascism.

Even Republican commentators, worried that he might be unstoppable, are saying it now. Military historian and Marco Rubio adviser Max Boot tweeted that “Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it.” Bush adviser John Noonan said the same.

The mainstream press is more overt. CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Trump point blank if he is a fascist. The Atlantic writes: “It’s hard to remember a time when a supposedly mainstream candidate had no interest in differentiating ideas he’s endorsed from those of the Nazis.”

There is a feeling of shock in the air, but anyone paying attention should have seen this last summer. Why did it take so long for the consciousness to dawn?

The word fascism has been used too often in political discourse, and almost always imprecisely. It’s a bit like the boy who cried wolf. You warn about wolves so much that no one takes you seriously when a real one actually shows up.

Lefties since the late 1930s have tended to call non-leftists fascists — which has led to a discrediting of the word itself. As time went on, the word became nothing but a vacuous political insult. It’s what people say about someone with whom they disagree. It doesn’t mean much more than that.

Then in the 1990s came Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 100 percent.” This law provided a convenient way to dismiss all talk of fascism as Internet babblings deployed in the midst of flame wars.

Godwin’s Law made worse the perception that followed the end of World War II: that fascism was a temporary weird thing that afflicted a few countries but had been vanquished from the earth thanks to the Allied war victory. It would no longer be a real problem but rather a swear word with no real substance.

Fascism Is Real

Without the term fascism as an authentic descriptor, we have a problem. We have no accurate way to identify what is in fact the most politically successful movement of the 20th century. It is a movement that still exists today, because the conditions that gave rise to it are unchanged.

The whole burden of one of the most famous pro-freedom books of the century — Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom — was to warn that fascism was a more immediate and pressing danger to the developed world than Russian-style socialism. And this is for a reason: Hayek said that “brown” fascism did not represent a polar opposite of “red” socialism. In the interwar period, it was common to see both intellectuals and politicians move fluidly from one to the other.

“The rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period,” wrote Hayek, “but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”

In Hayek’s reading, the dynamic works like this. The socialists build the state machinery, but their plans fail. A crisis arrives. The population seeks answers. Politicians claiming to be anti-socialist step up with new authoritarian plans that purport to reverse the problem. Their populist appeal taps into the lowest political instincts (nativism, racism, religious bigotry, and so on) and promises a new order of things under better, more efficient rule.

Last July, I heard Trump speak, and his talk displayed all the features of fascist rhetoric. He began with trade protectionism and held up autarky as an ideal. He moved to immigration, leading the crowd to believe that all their economic and security troubles were due to dangerous foreign elements among us. Then came the racial dog whistles: Trump demanded of a Hispanic questioner whether he was a plant sent by the government of Mexico.

There was more. He railed against the establishment that is incompetent and lacking in energy. He bragged about his lack of interest-group ties — which is another way of saying that only he can become the purest sort of dictator, with no quid pro quos to tie him down. (My article on this topic is here.)

Trump is clearly not pushing himself as a traditional American president, heading an executive branch and working with Congress and the judicial branch. He imagines himself as running to head a personal state: his will would be the one will for the country. He has no real plans beyond putting himself in charge — not only of the government but, he imagines, the entire country. It’s a difference of substance that is very serious.

The rest of the campaign has been easy to predict. He refashioned himself as pro-family, anti-PC, and even pro-religion. These traits come with the package — both a reaction to the far left and a fulfillment of its centralist ambitions.

The key to understanding fascism is this: It preserves the despotic ambitions of socialism while removing its most politically unpopular elements. In an atmosphere of fear and loathing, it assures the population that it can keep its property, religion, and faith — provided all these elements are channeled into a grand national project under a charismatic leader of high competence.

Douthat’s Analysis

As the realization has spread that Trump is the real deal, so has the quality of reflection on its implication. Most impressive so far has been Ross Douthat’s article in the New York Times. As he explains, Trump displays as least seven features of Umberto Eco’s list of fascist traits:

A cult of action, a celebration of aggressive masculinity, an intolerance of criticism, a fear of difference and outsiders, a pitch to the frustrations of the lower middle class, an intense nationalism and resentment at national humiliation, and a “popular elitism” that promises every citizen that they’re part of “the best people of the world.”

In this, Trump is different from other American politicians who have been called fascist, writes Douthat. George Wallace was a local-rights guy and hated Washington, whereas Trump loves power and thinks only in terms of centralization. Pat Buchanan’s extreme nativism was always tempered by his attachment to Catholic moral teaching that puts brakes on power ambitions.

Ross Perot was called a fascist, but actually he was a government reformer who wanted to bring business standards to government finance, which is very different from wanting to manage the entire country. And, for all his nonsense about jobs going to Mexico, Perot generally avoided racialist dog whistles.

Why Now and Not Before?

Why has genuine fascism been kept at bay in America? Why has the American right never taken the final step that might have plunged it into authoritarian, nativist aspirations?

Here Douthat is especially insightful:

Part of the explanation has to be that the American conservative tradition has always included important elements — a libertarian skepticism of state power, a stress on localism and states’ rights, a religious and particularly Protestant emphasis on the conscience of an individual over the power of the collective — that inoculated our politics against fascism’s appeal.

Douthat singles out libertarianism as an ideological brake on fascist longings. This is precisely right. Libertarianism grows out of the liberal tradition, which is about far more than merely hating the ruling-class establishment. Classical liberalism has universalist longings, embodied in its defenses of free trade, free speech, free migration, and freedom of religion. The central-planning feature of fascistic ideology is absolutely ruled out by libertarian love for spontaneous social and economic forces at work in society.

As for “energy” emanating from the executive branch, the liberal tradition can’t be clearer. No amount of intelligence, resources, or determined will from the top down can make [central planning] work. The problem is the apparatus itself, not the personalities and values of the rulers who happen to be in charge.

(I’m leaving aside the deep and bizarre irony that many self-professed libertarians have fallen for Trump, a fact which should be deeply embarrassing to anyone and everyone who has affection for human liberty. And good for Ron Paul for denouncing Trump’s authoritarianism in no uncertain terms.)

Can He Win?

Douthat seriously doubts that Trump can finally win over Republicans, due to “his lack of any real religious faith, his un-libertarian style and record, his clear disdain for the ideas that motivate many of the most engaged Republicans.”

I’m not so sure. The economic conditions that led to a rise of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Franco in Spain are nowhere close to being replicated here. Even so, income growth has stagnated, middle-class social ambitions are frustrated, and many aspects of [federal] government services are failing […] Add fear of terrorism to the mix, and the conditions, at least for some, are nearly right. What Trumpism represents is an attempt to address these problems through more of the same means that have failed in the past.

It’s time to dust off that copy of The Road to Serfdom and realize that the biggest threats to liberty come from unexpected places. While the rank and file are worrying themselves about the influence of progressive professors and group identity politics, they need to open their eyes to the possibility that the gravest threat to American rights and liberties exists within their own ranks.

If you want to understand more about fascism and its history, see this chapter from John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching.

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. 

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

Dispelling Popular Great Depression Myths: Robert Murphy’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal” (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Dispelling Popular Great Depression Myths: Robert Murphy’s “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal” (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
Originally Published November 25, 2009
as Part of Issue CCXIX of The Rational Argumentator
Republished July 23, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CCXIX of The Rational Argumentator on November 25, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 23, 2014
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Download a free audio recording of this essay here.

We live in times when fact and propaganda are all too easily – and often deliberately – conflated. I recall, a long time ago, sitting in my public high school’s Advanced Placement US History course, when the instructor explicitly mentioned “lack of government regulation” as one of the causes of the Great Depression. The odd aspect was that he prefaced this explanation with an explicit warning to me that I would not like what he was about to say.

It was as if he knew that he was presenting an ideologically charged position as fact – and he did it anyway, because, in his mind, no other interpretation of the Great Depression was possible. He and millions like him would benefit immensely from reading Robert P. Murphy’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The myth of the Great Depression being caused by laissez-faire capitalism – and being solved by either the New Deal, World War II, or both – is so prevalent that in popular-opinion surveys, Franklin Delano Roosevelt routinely appears in the top five of all US presidents, while the name of Herbert Hoover has become synonymous with government inaction during an economic crisis. Hundreds of books, essays, and even works of fiction have been published to challenge these notions – but somehow the fallacies have prevailed; and they have been eagerly exploited by the would-be FDRs of the past seven decades.

For millions of Americans who have not studied Austrian economics and the Mises/Hayek theory of the business cycle, or read the brilliant critiques of the New Deal by H.L. Mencken, Isabel Paterson, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, and John T. Flynn, the commonplace myth of laissez-faire as ruinous and FDR as savior appears true, self-evident, and incontestable. Unfortunately, many of these same people vote for politicians and policies that promise a “New New Deal.” Such a plan would further exacerbate the current economic crisis, which is fueled by hyperregulation, Federal Reserve manipulation of the money supply, and the unforeseen consequences of prior interventions, including the original New Deal.

Murphy’s work seeks to correct popular misunderstandings of the Great Depression by attacking them directly. Virtually every single commonly encountered assertion – that the Depression was caused by the excesses of capitalism, that Hoover exacerbated the Depression by “doing nothing,” that the New Deal revitalized economic activity and mitigated unemployment, and that World War II energized the United States into recovery – is refuted at length. In the course of this debunking, the reader is treated to concise, elegant explanations of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, the economics of tax reduction, the virtues of the gold standard and the dangers of fiat currencies, and to discussions of the errors both in Keynesian prescriptions for deficit spending and in the Chicago School’s suggestion that the Federal Reserve triggered the Great Depression by failing to inflate sufficiently.

To add flavor to the book and enable readers to identify with more concrete aspects of the policies it criticizes, Murphy discusses many of the follies and corruptions of the New Deal: FDR’s use of “lucky numbers” to set the price of gold, the persecution of the Schechter brothers for defying the National Recovery Administration’s restrictions on poultry production, FDR’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court with his supporters after the court ruled in favor of the Schechter brothers, the confiscation of private citizens’ gold holdings, and the New Dealers’ pervasive use of government funding to bribe and intimidate constituencies into supporting FDR’s policies.

Murphy skillfully reminds us that the politicians who seek to suppress our economic and political liberties in favor of a central plan are neither omniscient nor benevolent; they quite frequently pull policy prescriptions out of thin air and they are anything but evenhanded, tolerant, or concerned for objective human wellbeing. Behind the lofty rhetoric and faux amiability of men like FDR stands the harsh, impatient, implacable, and often indiscriminate enforcer, in the mold of those thugs who broke into peaceful men’s homes to ensure that they were not violating the National Industrial Recovery Act by sewing clothes at night.

If there is any hope for an intellectual rejection of New Deal ideology in the United States, Murphy’s book will be one of the crucial elements motivating it. Murphy bridges the gulf between high theory and the concerns accessible to the majority of readers. While it is unfortunate that, given the state of education in our time, most Americans would not be able to immunize themselves against common economic fallacies by directly reading Menger, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard, Murphy helps bring some of the key ideas of these thinkers into a format more accessible to a layman with no formal economic training.

Murphy also incorporates the work of such historians as Burton Folsom and Paul Johnson, and he draws on biographical information to shed light on the lives, motivations, and personalities of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and other key figures of the 1920s and 1930s. Murphy does for the popular understanding of the Great Depression in the early 21st century what Frederic Bastiat did for free trade in the mid-19th and what Leonard Read and Henry Hazlitt did for basic economic principles in the 20th.

I am a former student of Murphy, and I can credit his instruction for enabling me to advance from a basic understanding of Austrian economics to the publication of a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. From personal experience, I know him to be well-read, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and capable of articulating the arguments – and recognizing the strengths and weaknesses – of an immense variety of theories and worldviews. At the same time, he possesses a talent for communicating complex and challenging ideas, connecting them to concrete phenomena, and even joking about them.

As such, he is eminently suited to bringing some of the most important economic and historical insights of the 20th century to a mass audience. Indeed, it might reasonably be hoped that thousands of readers of this book will use it as a gateway to discovering the works of the many free-market thinkers cited therein. The lists of suggested readings (“Books You’re Not Supposed to Read”) peppered throughout the text make it a worthwhile purchase by themselves.

Perhaps someday my old US history teacher, and men like him, will use The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression in their courses to balance the many explicitly pro-New Deal and prointerventionist texts and presentations that dominate public-school curricula today. If this is too much to hope for, then at least this book has the potential to appeal to many young students and be sought out by them on their own initiative – as an antidote to the fallacies they encounter from “mainstream” sources.

Read other articles in The Rational Argumentator’s Issue CCXIX.

The IRS’s Job Is To Violate Our Liberties – Article by Ron Paul

The IRS’s Job Is To Violate Our Liberties – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
May 21, 2013
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“What do you expect when you target the President?” This is what an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent allegedly said to the head of a conservative organization that was being audited after calling for the impeachment of then-President Clinton. Recent revelations that IRS agents gave “special scrutiny” to organizations opposed to the current administration’s policies suggest that many in the IRS still believe harassing the President’s opponents is part of their job.

As troubling as these recent reports are, it would be a grave mistake to think that IRS harassment of opponents of the incumbent President is a modern, or a partisan, phenomenon. As scholar Burton Folsom pointed out in his book New Deal or Raw Deal, IRS agents in the 1930s where essentially “hit squads” against opponents of the New Deal. It is well-known that the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson used the IRS to silence their critics. One of the articles of impeachment drawn up against Richard Nixon dealt with his use of the IRS to harass his political enemies. Allegations of IRS abuses were common during the Clinton administration, and just this week some of the current administration’s defenders recalled that antiwar and progressive groups alleged harassment by the IRS during the Bush presidency.

The bipartisan tradition of using the IRS as a tool to harass political opponents suggests that the problem is deeper than just a few “rogue” IRS agents—or even corruption within one, two, three, or many administrations. Instead, the problem lies in the extraordinary power the tax system grants the IRS.

The IRS routinely obtains information about how we earn a living, what investments we make, what we spend on ourselves and our families, and even what charitable and religious organizations we support. Starting next year, the IRS will be collecting personally identifiable health insurance information in order to ensure we are complying with Obamacare’s mandates.

The current tax laws even give the IRS power to marginalize any educational, political, or even religious organizations whose goals, beliefs, and values are not favored by the current regime by denying those organizations “tax-free” status. This is the root of the latest scandal involving the IRS.

Considering the type of power the IRS excises over the American people, and the propensity of those who hold power to violate liberty, it is surprising we do not hear about more cases of politically motivated IRS harassment. As the third US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall said, “The power to tax is the power to destroy” — and whom better to destroy than one’s political enemies?

The US flourished for over 120 years without an income tax, and our liberty and prosperity will only benefit from getting rid of the current tax system. The federal government will get along just fine without its immoral claim on the fruits of our labor, particularly if the elimination of federal income taxes is accompanied by serious reduction in all areas of spending, starting with the military spending beloved by so many who claim to be opponents of high taxes and big government.

While it is important for Congress to investigate the most recent scandal and ensure all involved are held accountable, we cannot pretend that the problem is a few bad actors. The very purpose of the IRS is to transfer wealth from one group to another while violating our liberties in the process. Thus, the only way Congress can protect our freedoms is to repeal the income tax and shutter the doors of the IRS once and for all.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission.