Mises said that teaching the public was just as important as addressing scholars — maybe more so.That is what Lew Rockwell specializes in: history and theory and analysis in defense of the free society, written in clear prose to reach a broad audience. Rockwell’s new book is as pro-liberty as it is brutally critical of government. It is relentlessly forthright yet hopeful about the prospects for liberty. It is rigorous enough to withstand the enemy’s closest scrutiny, and chock full of the energy and enthusiasm that will keep you reading.
As a collection of speeches delivered over a period of ten years, Speaking of Libertyis long (470 pages), but it is the kind of book people will want to see in the hands of friends, family, and students. The book begins with economics, and explains why Austrian economics matters, how the Federal Reserve brings on the business cycle, why we need private property and free enterprise, the unrecognized glories of the capitalist economy, and why the gold standard is still the best monetary system. The remaining sections deal with war, Mises and his work, other important thinkers in the libertarian tradition, and the culture and morality of liberty.
The book is united by a set of fixed principles: the corruption of politics, the universality and immutability of the ideas of freedom, the centrality of sound money and free enterprise, the moral imperative of peace and trade, the importance of hope and tenacity in the struggle for liberty, and the need for everyone to join the intellectual fight. We all have searched for the book we could give to friends and neighbors, business associates and family members, to explain why we believe in the cause of liberty. Speaking of Liberty is that book.
“Critics of the free market are therefore the Wile E. Coyotes of our day: sitting on the stool in comfort, they systematically saw away at the legs beneath them, on the absurd assumption that they will be able to hang in the air indefinitely after their work is done. Along comes Lew Rockwell and shouts as loud as he can: ‘Beep, beep.'” Gary North
[Delivered at a memorial service at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, January 20, 1995.]
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a worldwide renewal in the scholarship of liberty.
”Give me a short description of his thought and contributions,” said the reporter when this free-market giant died at the age of 68. But how do you sum up Beethoven’s music or Dante’s poetry?
In 45 years of teaching and writing, Rothbard produced 25 books, thousands of articles, and three generations of students. He was a teacher who never stopped learning, an intellectual prize fighter who always punched cleanly. He battled every destructive trend in this century—socialism, statism, relativism, and scientism—and awakened a passion for freedom in thousands of scholars, journalists, and activists. At once a genius and a gentleman, his causes were honesty in scholarship, truth in history, principle in politics, and—first and foremost—human liberty itself.
Filled with laughter and principled beyond measure, Rothbard rejected the compromises and pretensions of the modern world. He was unaffected by intellectual fashion, undeterred by attacks, and untempted by opportunism. Quite simply, nothing stopped him. And as the Happy Warrior of economics, as Forbes called him, he made singular contributions to banking history, price theory, monopoly and antitrust, and business cycles, to name just a few areas.
For many years, he taught economics at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, working in a dingy, windowless office on the fifth floor, surrounded by Marxists. He never once complained, except to wonder why an engineering school couldn’t make the elevator work. His admirers celebrated his appointment as the S.J. Hall distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Teaching in New York, Las Vegas, Auburn, and at conferences around the world, Rothbard led the renaissance of the Austrian School of economics. He galvanized an academic and popular fight for liberty and property, against the omnipotent State and its court intellectuals.
Like his beloved teacher Mises, Rothbard wrote for the public as well as professionals. “Civilization and human existence are at stake, and to preserve and expand it, high theory and scholarship, though important, are not enough,” he wrote in 1993. “Especially in an age of galloping statism, the classical liberal, the advocate of the free market, has an obligation to carry the struggle to all levels of society.”
Rothbard’s theory was his practice. He was involved in nearly every political and social development of his time, from Robert Taft’s presidential campaign to the 1994 elections. His last article, appearing in the Washington Post, warned that Newt Gingrich is more likely to betray the revolution than lead it.
The Mises Institute is honored that Rothbard headed our academic programs for 13 years. He spoke at all our conferences and teaching seminars, edited our Review of Austrian Economics, consulted on our books and monographs, and wrote for our Free Market. Most of all, he taught and inspired our students, who will carry his ideas into the future.
Rothbard has been compared to the greatest minds in social science, but his wisdom and character led him to show gratitude to his predecessors. His formative intellectual event was the 1949 publication of Mises’s Human Action.
“I had gone through all the doctoral courses at Columbia University,” Rothbard wrote, “without once discovering that there was such a thing as an Austrian School, let alone that Ludwig von Mises was its foremost living champion.” But this book “solved all the problems and inconsistencies that I had sensed in economic theory.”
Rothbard attended Mises’s seminar at New York University from its first meeting, and became the student who would defend and extend Mises’s ideas, push the Austrian School tradition to new heights, and integrate it with political theory. He taught the movement how to write, and was also an important cultural influence.
The Austrian School had previously been a largely European intellectual movement. Mises changed that with his migration to this country. Rothbard completed this process, so that the locus of the school is no longer Europe, but America, the nation whose founding principles Rothbard and Mises so deeply admired.
Man, Economy, and State, Rothbard’s great work, was the key to the resurgence of Austrian economics after Mises’s death. Beginning with the philosophical foundation, Rothbard built an edifice of economic theory and an unassailable case for the market. In many ways, the book rescued economics from its mostly deserved reputation. Instead of the dismal, statist, and incomprehensible pseudoscience students are used to, Rothbard gave us a tightly reasoned, sweeping case for the free market that is still used in classrooms all over the world.
The book treated economics as a humane science, not as a branch of physics. Every page took account of the uncertainty of economic conditions, the certainty of change, and the central place of the entrepreneur, while never losing sight of the implacability of economic law. No wonder Henry Hazlitt, writing in National Review, called it “brilliant and original and profound.”
Since its publication, the treatise has only grown in stature. Through it, Rothbard has taught countless students to think like real economists instead of number crunchers. He explained and applied the logic of human action in economic exchange, and refuted its opponents. Like Mises, he looked not at “economic man,” but acting man who deals with the scarcity of time and resources.
Rothbard breathed life into economic theory with his historical works, and refuted the charge that Austrians are only concerned with high theory. He was also one of the few intellectuals on the Right to champion revisionist history. Other historians have since picked up his works and built on them to create entire schools of thought.
He wrote America’s Great Depression, applying the Misesian theory of the business cycle to refute the most common anticapitalist slander: that the market caused the crash and economic downturn of the 1930s. He showed that the villain was government intervention, in the form of credit expansion and Herbert Hoover’s high wage policies. Paul Johnson adopted the thesis for his Modern Times. He also refuted the then-dominant view of Herbert Hoover as a laissez-faire conservative, by showing that he was actually a premature New Dealer. In journal articles, he showed that the New Deal followed logically from the economic regimentation of World War I and the Progressive Era, which gave us central banking and the income tax.
Rothbard was once asked to write a short book of American history. He agreed, and it eventually appeared. But Conceived in Liberty was four large volumes on the period 1620–1780. His purpose was to highlight forgotten events that demonstrate the libertarian character of our history and people. It is masterful, revisionist, and a pleasure to read. But what happened to the original project? Rothbard explained that he had discovered so much (tax revolts! uprisings! betrayals! power grabs!) that was left out of conventional accounts.
The American revolution threw off tyranny, he argued. It was not simply a continuation of British-style statism in another guise, as Hamilton claimed. The new social order would protect communities, properties, and essential rights. Rothbard also proved to be as proficient a military historian as he was an interpreter of ideological history.
Rothbard hardly let a moment go to waste, teaching through the day and writing through the night. His wife of 41 years, JoAnn, tells of being awakened once by his newest discovery: “That bastard Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin after all!”
In his work, as in his life, he always sided with the pro-liberty forces against the welfare-warfare State. He especially liked the anti-New Dealers, the anti-imperialists, the Confederates, the anti-federalists, the tax resisters, the underground businessmen, the anti-State pamphleteers, and other unsung heroes. Throughout history the power elite has found profitable uses for the State. Rothbard never passed up a chance to name them, to explain how they did it, and to show how their actions harmed everyone else in society.
Conflict was the central theme of Rothbardian political economy: the State vs. voluntary associations, and the struggle over the ownership and control of property. He showed that property must be in private hands and owners must be free to control it as they see fit. The only logical alternative is the total State. There is no room for a “third-way” like social democracy, the mixed economy, or “good government,” and the attempt to create it is always disruptive.
Power and Market, another enduring contribution, zeroed in on this conflict, and attacked every form of government intervention, confounding one antimarket cliché after another, and defending market competition as essential to social peace. Where others looked for “market failure,” Rothbard found only government flops.
The book discussed the most common intervention in the market: taxation, the direct taking of someone’s property by a group claiming a monopoly on coercion, i.e., the State. The taxing power defines the State in the same way that theft defines a robber.
He also showed that there can be no neutral tax, that is, one that leaves the market exactly as it would be without the tax. All taxes distort. And all taxes are taxes on production and hinder it, even so-called consumption taxes.
Taxation takes capital from private hands and prevents it from being used to serve private interests and the consuming public. This is true regardless of the type of tax. Also, the government spends taxes in ways that alter the production patterns of the market. If money is spent on market-oriented projects, it unjustly competes; if it is spent on nonmarket projects, it is economically inefficient.
Taxes are never “contributions,” he argued. “Precisely because taxation is compulsory there is no way to assure—as is done automatically on the free market—that the amount any person contributes is what he would otherwise be willing to pay.” As Rothbard said, it is not utopian to work for a society without taxation; it is utopian to think that the power to tax won’t be abused once it is granted.
No principle of taxation, he argued, can equal a market system of fairness. A progressive tax discriminates on the basis of income; the rich aren’t forced to pay more for bread than the poor. A flat tax forces the same result, since higher incomes contribute a greater dollar amount than lower ones. The least harmful tax is a head tax or equal tax: a flat fee low enough for even the poorest to pay.
As a steadfast believer in free trade, Rothbard argued that peace between nations cannot rest on negotiations between State managers. Peace is kept by the network of exchange that develops between private parties. This is why he opposed false “free trade” such as Nafta and Gatt, which have more in common with neomercantilism, and he was the first to forecast the disaster Nafta has become.
Interventionists have long used the language of markets to advance statism. Consider antitrust law enforced in the name of “competition.” Rothbard showed that the only authentic monopolies are those created by law: the government subsidizes a producer at others’ expense (public hospitals and schools) or forbids competition altogether (the postal service).
Other forms of monopoly include licensure, that is, deliberately restricting the supply of labor or number of firms in a certain industry. Government monopolies always deliver inferior service at exorbitant prices. And they are “triangular interventions,” because they subsidize one party while preventing others from exchanging as they would in a free market.
He showed that unemployment insurance (actually, unemployment subsidies) increases the number of people out of work. Child labor laws, a favorite of unions and the Department of Labor, subsidize adult employment while preventing young people from gaining valuable work experience. Even eminent domain (“a license for theft”) fails under Rothbard’s property-rights strictures.
What about “intellectual property rights”? Rothbard defended the copyright as a contract made with consumers not to reprint a work, resell it, or falsely attribute the source. A patent on the other hand, is a government grant of monopoly privilege to the first discoverer of certain types of inventions to get to the government patent office.
And under public ownership, he argued, the “public” owns nothing, and the ruling officialdom owns all. “Any citizen who doubts this,” Rothbard suggested, “may try to appropriate for his own individual use his allotted part of ‘public’ property and then try to argue his case in court.”
The government sector focuses on the short run, he argued; there is no such thing as “public-sector investment.” It is only the private sector, which is the real public sector, Rothbard said, where property owners take long-run considerations into account. Unlike government, they preserve the value of resources, and do not plunder or waste them.
In his last scholarly article, he developed the idea of the nation as something separate from either the State or the individual, a collective identity based on language, ethnicity, race, and religion. Rothbard celebrated the post-Cold War emergence of the nation as a countervailing power to the State, and presented the hope that “the brutal and repressive state will be gradually dissolved into a harmonious and increasingly prosperous social order.” It was the final hope of a lifetime of hopes.
Many economists think numbers are the sum of the discipline. Rothbard turned the tables to argue that government data are gathered and used for piecemeal planning and the destruction of the economy. Whatever information markets need about economic conditions can be garnered privately.
A good example is the “trade deficit” between nations, which he said is no more relevant than the trade deficit between towns. There is no justification for assuming that trade must equal out in accounts. The important point is that people are benefiting from exchange, whether across the street or across the world.
Aren’t historical statistics useful for research? Many are misleading. The Gross Domestic Product counts government spending as production, when it should be counted as consumption. Also, government taxing is considered neutral when it’s destructive. Deficits, which drain savings and crowd out production, also need to be accounted for when assessing productivity.
Rothbard looked at private production by subtracting out the government component. The result is the Private Product Remaining, or PPR, which has served scholars as a basis for more accurate historical work. Using the PPR, for example, we see national product increasing at a much slower rate than the GDP, thanks to big government.
Even money-supply statistics were in need of revision in Rothbard’s view. Long before people gave up on the Fed’s ability to generate anything useful (the “M’s” are laughable these days), Rothbard proposed his own measure based on the Austrian School theory of money. It counts cash, deposits easily turned into cash, and all other liquid financial assets.
The State and its banking cartel is the worst possible money manager, Rothbard argued, and free enterprise is the best. He produced many studies on the abuse of money and banking by central bankers and the central State. They include his doctoral thesis, Panic of 1819, Mystery of Banking, and papers on the banking debates of the mid and late 19th century, the monetary debauchery of FDR, the fiasco of Bretton Woods, and the following age of inflation and monetary chaos. Just out is his Case Against the Fed, the best book ever written on the subject.
View the Federal Reserve as a counterfeiting syndicate, and we have Rothbard’s theory of the central bank. But, he pointed out, at least the counterfeiter doesn’t pretend to be working in the public interest, to be smoothing out business cycles, and to be keeping prices stable. He was also the first to analyze in depth and from a free-market perspective the special-interest groups that created the Fed.
Rothbard added to Austrian theory a systematic model for how money is destroyed. The State conspires with the central bank and the banking industry to enhance their mutual power and wealth by devaluation, the equivalent of coin clipping. Little by little, society’s money has less to do with its original form, and eventually it is transformed into paper created out of thin air, to best serve the State’s interest.
As a part of this process, the State intervenes to forbid customers from insisting on 100-percent reserves in checkable deposits. From there, it is progressively easier to move from gold to paper, as has happened in this country from the turn of the century.
Like Mises, Rothbard saw inflation as a policy pursued by the banking industry in league with the government. Those who get the newly created money first—banks, government, institutional securities traders, and government contractors, for example—win out because they can spend it before prices go up and investments are distorted. Those who get the new money later lose.
A Rothbardian gold standard is no watered-down version. He wanted convertibility at home and abroad. Only that system—which would put depositors in charge of insuring the financial soundness of the banking system—can prevent the Fed’s monetary depredations, which have reduced the value of the 1913 dollar to 5 cents today.
The ultimate guarantor against inflation is a private banking system with private coinage, a great American system that was squeezed out by the central State. Rothbard’s writings on money and banking—extensive and deep—may eventually become the single most influential aspect of his thought.
Economists rarely talk about liberty and private property and even less about what constitutes just ownership. Rothbard did, arguing that property acquired through confiscation, whether by private criminals or the State, is unjustly owned. (He also pointed out that bureaucrats pay no taxes, since their entire salaries are taxes.)
Ethics of Liberty was his moral defense. “Liberty of the individual,” Rothbard wrote, is “not only a great moral good in itself” but “also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes”: virtue, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity, civilization itself. “Out of liberty, stem the glories of civilized life.”
Once we understand why private property should be inviolable, troublesome notions fall by the wayside. There can be no “civil rights” apart from property rights, because the necessary freedom to exclude is abolished. “Voting rights” are also a fiction, which—depending on how they are used—can also diminish freedom. Even the “right to immigrate” is phony: “On whose property does someone else have the right to trample?” he asked.
Thus, the Rothbardian social order is no ACLU free-for-all. The security of property provides lines of authority, restraints on behavior, and guarantees of order. The result is social peace and prosperity. The conflicts we face today, from affirmative action to environmentalism, are the result of false rights being put ahead of private property.
In defense of capitalism, Rothbard was uncompromising. But he did not see the market as the be-all and end-all of the social order. For him, capitalism was not a “system,” but a consequence of the natural order of liberty. Neither “growth” nor “greed” is the capitalist ideal. In the free economy, leisure and charity are goods like any other, to be “purchased” by giving up alternative uses of time and money.
And with growing prosperity the need for material goods falls relative to nonmaterial goods. “Rather than foster ‘material’ values, then, advancing capitalism does just the opposite.” No society has ever been as grasping and greedy as the Soviet Union, although the Left is still trying to convince us that State power equals compassion.
A Rothbardian world would be a world without politics. But Murray was no dropout, and in fact loved politics. Who else could write a 5,000-word essay on a random week of electoral life in New York City, and make every word fascinating?
His political writings date from the early 1950s, when he wrote for Faith and Freedom, a hard-Right, isolationist publication. In articles on the evils of the military buildup, he warned that American liberty would be sacrificed to the Cold War.
That led to his break with the Buckleyites, who ridiculed him and his ideas. They never took him on directly; they were smarter than that. Instead, they smeared him in private, and tried to deny him publishing and speaking opportunities.
As editor of Left and Right and Libertarian Forum, Rothbard also predicted that the Cold War would someday end because Soviet socialism would collapse. But, he said, the American military machine would keep on cranking out the planes and bombs. The real threat, he maintained, was not foreign Communism, but US militarism and socialism, which would do what the Soviets never could: steal our liberty.
Rothbard developed a large and growing audience for such views, and continued with this theme for the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, writing against US military interventions in Panama, the Gulf, Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. As the official Left and Right pushed for a New World Order, Rothbard, exasperated, suggested we save time and just invade the entire globe.
Well, here we are 40 years after Rothbard began his foreign-policy writings. The warfare State is as big as ever, and so is the welfare State. National Review—which has always cozied up to power, and, like other neoconservatives, even holds up the dictators Lincoln and Roosevelt for our admiration—is still cheerleading the Republican establishment to new levels of hypocrisy. And we can see that Rothbard was right all along: right about the military, right about politics, right about the Buckleyite conservatives and their love of State power.
That is why Rothbard has triumphed in the end. Despite its attempt to purge and destroy him, National Review‘s influence on the intellectual world hasn’t come close to Rothbard’s. And when the Buckleyites are long forgotten, Rothbard’s authority will not have begun to peak.
For Rothbard, politics and criminal behavior are largely the same enterprise, to be treated with the same investigative rigor. Every day required another whodunit. His motivation in political writing was exposing crime and denouncing criminals.
Some people say that Rothbard’s politics were all over the map. That is not true. He set the political standard as liberty itself, and worked with anyone who pursued it. At the height of the Vietnam War, for example, when the official Right was countenancing mass murder, he looked to the New Left as a vehicle for stopping this most vicious form of statism.
But as the Cold War ended, Rothbard was overjoyed to reunite with the remnants of the Old Right. After he was in paleoconservative circles only a few months, we began to witness new ideological hybrids springing up: anarcho-Southern agrarianism, anarcho-anti-federalism, anarcho-protectionism, and anarcho-monarchism. Their advocates were his colleagues, and he was their conscience.
Rothbard’s political thought is simple at its core but astounding in its application. He believed that common moral strictures, and standards of evaluation, should apply to the State.
If theft is wrong, it is wrong. The same goes for murder, kidnapping, lying, and fraud. They are as wrong for the State as for everyone else.
“Always and ever,” he wrote, “the government and its rulers and operators have been considered above the general moral law.” It is this that Rothbard’s right-wing “anarchism” was devoted to ending: he wanted to make government subject to the rule of law. But Rothbard was no Utopian; his view was that government power should be limited in any way possible, and he worked to make it so.
His pioneering studies of private courts predated the popularity of private arbiters. (Rothbard wanted to abolish “jury slavery” and force courts to pay a market wage.) His work on private law enforcement predated the popularity of home protection and private security. His promotion of private roads predated their wide use in suburbs and malls. His promotion of private schools predated the anti-public school revolt.
What Rothbard wrote about Mises applies in his case as well:
never would Mises compromise his principles, never would he bow the knee to a quest for respectability or social or political favor. As a scholar, as an economist, and as a person, Ludwig von Mises was a joy and an inspiration, an exemplar for us all.
Like Mises, Rothbard gave up money and fame in academic economics to promote what is true and right. And he set all who knew him an example of how a man should live his life.
The Mises Institute was blessed to be associated with him, and he credited the Institute with having “at last forged an Austrian revival that Mises would be truly proud of.”
Rothbard’s ideas and character, like those of Mises, must be always before us, and before new generations as well. The Mises Institute will ensure that it is so. We are still discovering the breadth and depth of Rothbard’s literary legacy, with the publication of volumes one and two of Rothbard’s history of economic thought, put out by Edward Elgar shortly after his death. It is the most important work of its kind since Joseph Schumpeter’s.
Whereas other texts pretend to be an uninterrupted march toward higher levels of truth, Rothbard illuminated a history of unknown geniuses and lost knowledge, of respected charlatans and honored fallacies.
Later in 1995, a two-volume compilation of his important economic articles, totaling more than 1,000 pages, will appear in Elgar’s “Economists of the 20th Century” series edited by Mark Blaug. In addition, there are unpublished manuscripts, articles, and letters to fill many more volumes.
From Menger to Rothbard, Austrian School economists have argued that man is motivated by much more than mere self-interest and profit maximization. If the neoclassicals emphasize homo economicus, the Austrian School studies homo agens, the person who acts for a wide variety of reasons, including those that have nothing to do with material gain.
Murray N. Rothbard was empirical proof that the Austrian theory is correct. In his professional and personal life, he always put classical virtues ahead of his private interest. His generosity, his constancy, and his faith helped make him not only a giant among scholars, but also a giant among men.
His acts of charity were uncountable. How many times have I seen a student approach him at one or two in the morning at a teaching conference and ask a question about the gold standard, or economics as a purely logical science? He had been asked the same thing a thousand times before, but that student would never know it, as Rothbard enthusiastically explained everything.
Many, myself included, were schooled in economics, politics, philosophy, history, and much more at his feet. If his beneficiaries defaulted on their debts to him, as they so often did, he would shrug it off.
In an age of Limbaughvian self-promotion, Rothbard always pointed beyond himself, and never tired of extolling the greatness of his beloved teacher, Ludwig von Mises.
He never wanted, nor would he have tolerated, a cult of Rothbard. He lived to see the emergence and development of Rothbardian political economy, but he never once acknowledged its existence. Even his demeanor suggested this. Was there ever a genius with so little pretension?
Rothbard took ideas so seriously that he refuted even the most idiotic thoughts from the most irrelevant sources. How few of these people realized that he was paying them the ultimate compliment: treating them as if they were his equals.
Rothbard never sought academic or popular prestige. A first look at his bibliography seems to reveal a prolific genius with little marketing sense. But that was the point: despite his promotion of the free market, Rothbard never let the market determine what he would think or say. He adhered to what is right regardless of self-interest.
Imagine, for example, the courage it took to carry on the American isolationist tradition—almost single-handedly—in a time of hysterical pro-war propaganda.
He could have given up his anti-interventionism in foreign policy and been a big shot in conservatism. He might have been National Review‘s favorite intellectual. Who knows? He might have even made the pages of Commentary. Or he could have given up his free-market and strict private-property views, or at least downplayed them, and been rewarded by the Left. At the height of the Vietnam War, this would have made him a star at the Nation.
Some say that Rothbard’s constancy was a vice, that he refused to change his mind. In fact, no one was more ready for correction. In recent years, to take just one example, he wrote that he had neglected the cultural foundations of liberty, and cheered those who hadn’t.
In a contradictory accusation, others have said that Rothbard’s consistency is a myth, that in his long political life he swung from Right to Left to Right. This is a smear. In moral and cultural matters, he was always a reactionary. In politics, Rothbard’s constancy was based on his belief in the primacy of foreign policy. When a nation becomes an empire, he argued, the prospects for liberty are nil. Look for the opponents of war and imperialism during his life, and there you would find Rothbard.
One final trait of Rothbard’s: he was a man of faith. He believed that there is order in the universe, that natural law is real and intractable, that truth exists and that it can set us free. His faith was the faith of all men who have put ideals ahead of selfish concerns.
If we are to live up to Rothbard’s example, what must we do? Read and research and produce quality scholarship, commit ourselves to promoting liberty and fighting the State, act on our convictions with tireless energy, never sell out, never give in, and never forget that we will win in the end.
We have one other duty. Without him here to object, we can at last tell the truth about the world-historical figure that was Murray N. Rothbard, who now belongs to the ages.
Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.
Rockwell was Ron Paul‘s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982[4][5] and was a consultant to Paul’s 1988 Libertarian Party campaign for President of the United States.[6] He was vice-chair of the exploratory committee for Paul’s run for the 1992 Republican Party nomination for president.[7]
The Mises Institute published Rockwell’s Speaking of Liberty, an anthology of editorials which were originally published on his website, along with transcripts from some of his speaking engagements.
In 1985, Rockwell was named a contributing editor to Conservative Digest.[9] During the 1990s Rothbard, Rockwell and others described their views as paleolibertarian to emphasize their commitment to cultural conservatism, even as they continued to hold anti-statist beliefs.[10] In a 2007 interview Rockwell revealed he no longer considered himself a “paleolibertarian” and was “happy with the term libertarian.” He explained “the term paleolibertarian became confused because of its association with paleoconservative, so it came to mean some sort of socially conservative libertarian, which wasn’t the point at all….”[11]
Rockwell’s website, LewRockwell.com, formed in 1999, features articles and blog entries by a number of columnists and writers. Its motto is “anti-war, anti-state, pro-market”.[12]There also is a weekly podcast called the Lew Rockwell Show.[13] As of May 2013 LRC was in the top 10,000 websites worldwide.[14] LewRockwell.com publishes a variety of articles opposing war and imperialism, questioning United States participation in World War II, opposing “economic fascism” and supporting Austrian economics and secessionism.[15]
Reason magazine reported Rockwell was a founding officer and former Vice President at Ron Paul & Associates[16] which was one of the publishers of a variety of political and investment-oriented newsletters bearing Paul’s name.[17][18]
In January 2008, during Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, James Kirchick of the New Republic uncovered a collection of Ron Paul newsletters and alleged that they “reveal decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays.”[18][19] For instance, one issue of a newsletter described African-Americans as “animals”,[18] another asserted that 95% of them were criminals,[20] and another approved of the slogan “Sodomy = Death” and said homosexuals suffering from HIV/AIDS “enjoy the pity and attention that comes with being sick”.[18]
Kirchick noted that most of the articles contained no bylines.[18] Numerous sources alleged that Rockwell had ghostwritten the controversial newsletters;[21] Rockwell is listed as “contributing editor” on physical copies of some newsletters[22][23] and listed as sole Editor of the May 1988 “Ron Paul investment Newsletter”.[24]Reason magazine reported that “a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists – including some still close to Paul” had identified Rockwell as the “chief ghostwriter” of the newsletters,[16] as did former Ron Paul Chief of Staff (1981–1985) John W. Robbins.[25]
Rockwell admitted to Kirchick that he was “involved in the promotion” of the newsletters and wrote the subscription letters but denied ghostwriting the articles. He said there were “seven or eight freelancers involved at various stages” of the newsletter’s history and indicated another individual who had “left in unfortunate circumstances”, but whom he did not identify, was in charge of editing and publishing the newsletters.[26] Ron Paul himself repudiated the newsletters’ content and said he was not involved in the daily operations of the newsletters or saw much of their content until years later.[21] In 2011 Paul’s spokesperson Jesse Benton said that Paul had “taken moral responsibility because they appeared under his name and slipped through under his watch”.[27]
Other activities and views
Lew Rockwell speaking at an event hosted by the Mises Institute.
Rockwell was closely associated with anarcho-capitalist theorist Murray Rothbard until Rothbard’s death in 1995. Rockwell’s paleolibertarian ideology, like Rothbard’s in his later years, combines a right-libertarian theory of capitalist anarchism based on natural rights with the cultural values and concerns of paleoconservatism, and he identifies strongly with the modern Rothbardian tradition of Austrian economics. In politics, he advocates federalist or Anti-Federalist policies as means to achieve increasing degrees of freedom from central government and secession for the same political decentralist reasons. Rockwell has called environmentalism “[a]n ideology as pitiless and Messianic as Marxism.”[28]
Jump up^Berlet, Chip. The Write Stuff: U. S. Serial Print Culture from Conservatives out to Neonazis,Library Trends – Volume 56, Number 3, Winter 2008, pp. 570–600.
Jump up^Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. “The Case for Paleo-libertarianism” in Liberty magazine, January 1990, 34–38.
Jump up^Rockwell, L. H., Jr. (1990). “An anti-environmentalist manifesto.” From The Right, Quarterly II, 1(6), 1. (newsletter of Patrick J. Buchanan), p. 1; Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto, May 1, 2000 version published by Lewrockwell.com
Donald Trump, Fascism, and Racism with Jeffrey Tucker
Jeffrey Tucker on The Left/Right Paradigm: “We Should Hold out a Principled Position”
Jeffrey Tucker Let’s Talk Bitcoin#1
Capitalism Is About Love (Jeffrey Tucker – Acton Institute)
What is the State, and what does it do? — Jeffrey Tucker
The New World of Breaking Bad — Jeffrey Tucker
Economics of Non-Scarce Resources — Jeffrey Tucker
Jeffrey Tucker – Liberty Classics: Socialism
Jeffrey Tucker – Liberty Classics: The God of the Machine
Jeffrey Tucker – Liberty Classics: The Rise and Fall of Society
What Libertarians Should Do — Jeffrey Tucker
How Murray Rothbard Became a Libertarian
Libertarianism | Murray N. Rothbard
Jeffrey Albert Tucker (born December 19, 1963) is an American economics writer of the Austrian School, an advocate of anarcho-capitalism and Bitcoin, a publisher oflibertarian books, a conference speaker, and an internet entrepreneur.
A son of the Texas historian Albert Briggs Tucker and Roberta Janeice (Robertson) Tucker, Jeffrey Albert Tucker was born in Fresno, California in 1963.[5]
While studying at George Mason, Tucker attended a journalism program in Washington, D.C., where he became a volunteer at the Washington office of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.[7]
In the late 1980s, he went to work for Ron Paul,[7] as an assistant to editor Lew Rockwell, a co-founder of the Mises Institute, who produced political and investment newsletters on behalf of the former congressman.[8][9][10] In 2008, when criticism arose about Paul newsletters from the late 1980s and early 1990s for rhetoric they contained regarding blacks and gays, Reason magazine asked Tucker about the controversy, and he declined to comment.[9]
From 1997 to 2011 Tucker worked for the Mises Institute as editorial vice president and editor for the institute’s website, Mises.org. From 1999 to 2011 he also contributed scholarly efforts and humorous essays to LewRockwell.com.[7]
In late 2011 he was hired by Addison Wiggin as publisher and executive editor of Laissez Faire Books,[11][12] and worked in that capacity until 2016. He remains a contributor to LFB.
Tucker was appointed a Distinguished Fellow of the Foundation for Economic Education in 2013,[13] speaking at FEE’s seminars and writing for its publication The Freeman. As of 2016, he was FEE’s Director of Digital Development.[2][14]
Tucker has appeared as a speaker at numerous conferences on Bitcoin,[20][21] Austrian school economics, and libertarianism,[22] including events of the Free State Project and the 2016 Libertarian Party national convention.
Social media
In 2013, Tucker founded and became the CEO (under the title “Chief Liberty Officer”) of Liberty.me, a “social network and online publishing platform for the liberty minded”, which launched a successful Indiegogofundraising campaign in 2013 and began operation in 2014.[1]
Henry Hazlitt: Giant For Liberty (with Llewellyn H. Rockwell and Murray N. Rothbard, 1994, Ludwig von Mises Institute, ISBN 978-0945466161): an annotated bibliography of the works of Henry Hazlitt. AFoundation for Economic Education review described the book, which “includes citations of a novel, works on literary criticism, treatises on economics and moral philosophy, several edited volumes, some 16 other books and many chapters in books, plus articles, commentaries, and reviews,” as “an apt eulogy of Henry Hazlitt.”[27]
Sing Like a Catholic (2009, Church Music Association of America, ISBN 978-1607437222): essays on church music
Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo (2010, Ludwig von Mises Institute, ISBN 978-1933550893)
It’s a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes (2011, Ludwig von Mises Institute, ISBN 978-1610161947)
Hack Your Shower Head: and 10 Other Ways to Get Big Government out of Your Home (2012, Laissez Faire Books, ISBN 978-1621290636)
A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Create Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age (2012, Laissez Faire Books, ISBN 978-1621290414): on the effects of small business regulation
Liberty.me: Freedom Is a Do-It-Yourself Project (2014, Liberty.me, ISBN 978-1630690328)
Bit by Bit: How P2P is Freeing the World (2015, e-book)
Advice for Young, Unemployed Workers (2015, pamphlet, Foundation for Economic Education, ISBN 978-1572460393)
In translation
Four of Tucker’s books have been published in Spanish translations, including the following:[28]
Milagros del sector privado y crímenes del sector público (2014, ISBN 978-8472096387)
Story 1: Donald Trump is a Libertarian-Leaning Conservative and Ted Cruz is Hard Core Conservative — Trump/Cruz Ticket? — Conservatives Intellectuals Need To Focus on Results Not Words — The Republican Party Is Not A Conservative Party — Conservatives and Libertarians Voters Have Been Abandoning Both The Democratic and Republican Parties Who Are Bought and Paid For By The Donor Base — The Tyranny of Two Party System — Corrupt Big Government Parties — The Decline and Fall of American Republic — Remembering 9/11 — Videos
History Documentary – World Trade Center attacks, Rise and Fall of the twin towers
911 Jumpers 9/11 in 18 min Plane Crashes Top World Trade Center Towers September 11 Terror Fact Vid
Russell Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles
The Republican Party Has Ceased To be Conservative
Mark Levin • John Boehner’s GOP is NOT a Conservative Party • Hannity • 1/7/15 •
Liberal Party: 10 Reasons You Might Be A Liberal – Learn Liberty
Libertarianism: An Introduction
Murray Rothbard: Six Stages of the Libertarian Movement
Libertarianism | Murray N. Rothbard
Kirzner on Rothbard & Libertarianism
TAKE IT TO THE LIMITS: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism
Jon Stewart’s 19 Tough Questions for Libertarians!
Capitalism Needs Regulation – Why Max Keiser is Correct and Libertarians are Mistaken!
Liberals and Conservatives Will Never Agree – A Conversation with William Gairdner
The History of Classical Liberalism
The Decline and Triumph of Classical Liberalism (Pt. 1) | Learn Liberty
The Decline and Triumph of Classical Liberalism (Pt. 2) | Learn Liberty
FOX NEWS Hates Conservatives And Are WHAT”S WRONG WITH THE GOP PARTY
Mark Levin Eviscerates Megyn Kelly Fox News
Donald Trump vs. Fox News | Republican Presidential Debate Analysis!
McConnell on Iran Deal: ‘Obama Won Short-Term Battle, But We Won the Argument’
House Spars Over Iran Nuclear Agreement
Dennis Prager’s Top 10 Ways Liberalism Makes America Worse
NATIONAL REVIEW’S JONAH GOLDBERG: ‘COUNT ME OUT’ OF ANY CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT WITH DONALD TRUMP
By BEN SHAPIRO
On Saturday, National Review senior editor Jonah Goldbergpenned a controversial column in which he rejected Donald Trump and his followers from the conservative movement. “Well, if this is the conservative movement now, I guess you’re going to have to count me out,” Goldberg writes.
Goldberg goes on to suggest that the embrace of Trump perverts conservatism itself, broadening the definition of the movement in order to include Trump.
Goldberg, whom I consider a friend and a brilliant commentator, is right to label Trump insufficiently conservative. I have specifically argued that Trump ought not be the nominee thanks to his insufficient conservatism—so has Michelle Malkin, so have numerous other conservative commentators.
But here is the sad truth: Many of the same people appalled by Trump made Trump’s candidacy possible.
Trump is a product of a conservatism-less Republicanism, prepared for and championed by the intellectual elites who told us to ignore Mitt Romney’s creation of Romneycare and
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) 43% ’s campaign finance reform, who told conservatives to shut up and get in line, who explained that conservatives had to throw over Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 96% and his government shutdowns in favor of
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) 52% and his pathological inability to take a hard stand against President Obama using the tools at his disposal.
Over at National Review, even as Goldberg condemns Trump for his non-conservatism, another columnist simultaneously urges a ticket with Governor “God Told Me To Use Obamacare Money To Expand Medicaid” John Kasich (R-OH) and Sen. Marco “Immigration Gang of Eight” Rubio (R-FL). Goldberg himself championed Romney’s candidacy because he wasn’t a conservative, writing back in 2012:
Even if Romney is a Potemkin conservative (a claim I think has merit but is also exaggerated), there is an instrumental case to be made for him: It is better to have a president who owes you than to have one who claims to own you. A President Romney would be on a very short leash.
Why wouldn’t the same logic apply to Trump?
And while Goldberg today raps Trump on the knuckles for his support of socialized medicine, going so far as to label opposition to such policy a “core tenet of American conservatism from Day One,” Goldberg used Romneycare as a point in favor of Romney in 2012: “He is a man of duty and purpose. He was told to ‘fix’ health care in ways Massachusetts would like… He did it all. The man does his assignments.”
Goldberg today says that Trump doesn’t deserve to be a part of the conservative movement, and his followers have excised themselves from the conservative community. But in 2012, he warned that anyone saying the same of Mitt Romney threatened the possibility of conservative victory. In 2012, Goldberg explicitly opposed purges and purity tests:
That’s certainly reason enough to be mad at the establishment. But replacing the current leadership with even more ardent, passionate and uncompromising conservatives is far from a guaranteed formula for making the Republican Party more popular or powerful. To do that, the GOP needs to persuade voters to become a little more conservative, not to hector already-conservative politicians to become even more pure as they go snipe-hunting for the Rockefeller Republicans.
What requirements did Mitt Romney, and John Kasich, and John McCain, and Mitch McConnell fulfill that Trump does not? Goldberg is right that Trump has “no ideological guardrails whatsoever” when it comes to taxes and “knows less than most halfway-decent DC interns about foreign policy.” Goldberg could have added that Trump has made an enormous amount of money utilizing eminent domain, that he supports affirmative action, and that he opposes free trade, among other pernicious positions. There is a reason that this weekend full-fledged economic idiot Paul Krugman endorsed Trump’s economic policies.
The question is: Why are so many Republicans backing him? There are two answers: first, he’s tough on illegal immigration, the only issue many conservatives believe matters. The second answer is more telling, however: Trump has heavy support because Republicans rejected ideological purity a long time ago. And here’s the irony: Goldberg and others can’t call Tea Partiers to Jesus on Trump because, according to polls, Tea Partiers don’t support Trump in outsized numbers. The reality is that the same people who don’t like ideological litmus tests support Trump. Just a few weeks back, the Washington Post concluded that Trump’s fans “are more moderate than Tea Partiers were,” significantly more likely to call themselves Republicans than Tea Partiers were, far younger and less religious and blue collar than Tea Partiers.
As Sallah from Raiders of the Lost Ark would put it, “Jonah, you’re digging in the wrong place.”
If you want to target Trump supporters for failing to take conservatism seriously, try starting with those who don’t take conservatism seriously. Most of them were trained in the acceptability of “victory before conservatism” Republicanism by the some of the same folks now deriding the poll-leading Trump.
I’ve lived this story before: I’m from California. Trump is Arnold Schwarzenegger without the Austrian accent. He’s a know-nothing with a huge name and a Teflon personality, and people get behind him because he’s a celebrity and because victory matters more than principle. I know that’s so, because I made the same mistake with regard to Schwarzenegger, explicitly endorsing him in spite of his insufficient conservatism on the grounds that voters in California would get used to voting Republican.
That was a failure. Schwarzenegger was terrible, and what followed him was a shift to radical leftism unthinkable in the early days of his candidacy. I learned that lesson, and in January 2012, I said that the conservative embrace of Mitt Romney would pervert the movement itself, in the same way Goldberg now accuses Trump of perverting conservatism:
Yes, defeating horrible politicians like Barack Obama is the top goal — but that doesn’t justify redefining conservatism entirely…. When we deliberately broaden conservatism to encompass government-forced purchase of health insurance or raising taxes or appointing liberal judges or enforcing same-sex marriage or using taxpayer money to bail out business or pushing trade barriers, we destroy conservatism from within. If we do that, why would our politicians even bother to pay lip service to the standard?
Like Goldberg, I fear the same from Trump: I fear that he’ll be a wild card with no governing principle, that even if he were to win, he’d irrevocably split conservatism. But I also recognize that Trump isn’t a departure for Republicans abandoning principle: he’s the political love child of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, a combination of the non-conservative “victory mentality” and the arrogance of a dictatorial left many conservatives want to see countered with fire.
In sum, I’m happy to welcome establishment Republicans who want to revivify conservative litmus tests to the party. But from now on, let’s be consistent: if we’re going to oust Trump based on his ideology, those requirements can’t be waived for others.
Did you ever think you would see the day when the GOP front-runner rarely uttered the words “freedom” and “liberty”? Perhaps some Republicans can be accused of loving liberty and freedom too much — or at least using those words as rhetorical crutches. Donald Trump is not one of them. The current GOP presidential front-runner rarely uses the words “freedom” or “liberty” in his remarks at all.
Trump didn’t use the words “freedom” or “liberty” in his announcement speech. He didn’t use those words in his Nashville speech on August 29, or his Nashville rally on August 21, or his appearance at the Iowa State Fair on August 15, or his rally and news conference in New Hampshire on August 14, or his news conference in Birch Run, Mich., or his press conference in Laredo, Texas, on July 23.
He didn’t use those words while discussing his signing of the Republican National Committee’s pledge last Thursday, or in his contentious interview with Hugh Hewitt the same day.
Trump did use the term “free-market” once during his Meet the Press interview with Chuck Todd, in a defense of his qualified support for affirmative action: “Well, you know, you have to also go free market. You have to go capability. You have to do a lot of things. But I’m fine with affirmative action.” The word “liberty” didn’t even come up.
This is an unusual vocabulary for a Republican front-runner. It wasn’t that long ago that grass-roots conservatives showed up at Tea Party rallies with signs reading, “Liberty: All the Stimulus We Need.” The Tea Party named itself after an event organized by the Sons of Liberty. The GOP platform declares the party was “born in opposition to the denial of liberty.”
Trump’s lexicon is another indicator of the dramatic shift he would represent in moving the Republican party from a libertarian-leaning one to a populist one. During the Obama era, self-identified libertarians have asked whether the Tea Party and the GOP are truly dedicated to liberty and individual rights, or if their real objection to big government is that it’s controlled by Democrats. The embrace of Trump suggests their skepticism was well-founded.
It’s no accident that Trump has been labeled a populist by outlets across the political spectrum, from The American Interest to NPR. His speeches and off-the-cuff remarks make clear that he doesn’t see the world through the lens of free and unfree; he sees it through the lens of strength and weakness: For me, conservatism as it pertains to our country is fiscal. We have to be strong and secure and get rid of our debt. The military has to be powerful and not necessarily used but very powerful. I am on the sort of a little bit social side of conservative when it comes — I want people to be taken care of from a health-care standpoint. But to do that, we have to be strong. I want to save Social Security without cuts. I want a strong country. And to me, conservative means a strong country with very little debt.
The man whose slogan is “Make America Great Again” doesn’t seem particularly worried about a Leviathan state infringing upon its citizens’ liberties. He sees a disordered society whose people are threatened by violent criminals coming across the border, undermined by poor negotiation in foreign-trade and security agreements, and asked by free-riding allies to shoulder way too much of the burden in a dangerous world.
That philosophy is dramatically different from the liberty-focused message Republicans have become accustomed to since the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. And, at least for now, it has made Trump the front-runner by a wide margin.
Ban late abortions; exceptions for rape, incest or health: Strongly Opposes topic 1
Stress importance of a strong family, & a culture of Life: Opposes topic 1
I am now pro-life; after years of being pro-choice: Strongly Opposes topic 1
I changed my views to pro-life based on personal stories: Opposes topic 1
I am pro-life; fight ObamaCare abortion funding: Opposes topic 1
Pro-choice, but ban partial birth abortion: Favors topic 1
Favors abortion rights but respects opposition: Favors topic 1
Cannot change Medicare or Soc.Sec. and still win elections: Opposes topic 6
Social Security isn’t an “entitlement”; it’s honoring a deal: Opposes topic 6
Pay off debt; put $3T interest savings into Trust Fund: Opposes topic 6
Let people invest their own retirement funds: Strongly Favors topic 6
No government investment of retirement funds: Strongly Favors topic 6
Capital punishment isn’t uncivilized; murderers living is: Strongly Favors topic 9
Death penalty deters like violent TV leads kids astray: Favors topic 9
Hold judges accountable; don’t reduce sentences: Favors topic 9
For tough anti-crime policies; not criminals’ rights: Favors topic 9
The below is a way of thinking about the candidate’s political philosophy by dividing the candidate’s VoteMatch answers into “social” and “economic” questions. It is only a theory – please take it with a grain of salt!Social Questions: Liberals and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while conservatives and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictive answers.
Economic Questions: Conservatives and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while liberals and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictive answers.
Candidate’s Score
The candidate scored the following on the VoteMatch questions:
Social Score
25%
Economic Score
78%
Where the Candidate Fits In
Where the candidate’s Social score meets the Economic score on the grid below is the candidate’s political philosophy. Based on the above score, the candidate is a Libertarian-Leaning Conservative.
Social ScoreThis measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s personal lives or on social issues. These issues include health, morality, love, recreation, prayer and other activities that are not measured in dollars.
A high score (above 60%) means the candidate believes in tolerance for different people and lifestyles.
A low score (below 40%) means the candidate believes that standards of morality & safety should be enforced by government.
Economic Score
This measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s economic lives. Economic issues include retirement funding, budget allocations, and taxes.
A high score (above 60%) means the candidate believes in personal responsibility for financial matters, and that free-market competition is better for people than central planning by the government.
A low score (below 40%) means the candidate believes that a good society is best achieved by the government redistributing wealth. The candidate believes that government’s purpose is to decide which programs are good for society, and how much should be spent on each program.
This measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s economic lives. Economic issues include retirement funding, budget allocations, and taxes.
How We Score Candidates
How we determine a candidate’s stance on each VoteMatch question:
We collect up votes, excerpts from speeches, press releases, and so on, which are related to each question. Each of these are shown on the candidate’s VoteMatch table.
We assign an individual score for each item on the list. The scores can be: Strongly Favor, Favor, Neutral/Mixed, Oppose, Strongly Oppose. The scoring terms refer to the text of the question, not whether the candidate strongly opposed a bill, for example.
We then average the individual scores, using the numeric scale: Strongly Favor = 2, Favor = 1, Neutral/Mixed = 0, Oppose = -1, Strongly Oppose = -2.
If the average is above 1, the overall answer to the question is Strongly Favor.
If the average is above 0, the overall answer to the question is Favor.
If the average is exactly 0, the overall answer to the question is Neutral.
If the average is below 0, the overall answer to the question is Oppose.
If the average is below -1, the overall answer to the question is Strongly Oppose.
When you do a VoteMatch quiz, your answers are compared to each candidates’ overall answer to come up with a matching percentage.
To get the political philosophy of the candidate, we sum up the answers on two scales, the Personal/Social scale and the Economic Scale. Some questions aren’t used in the political philosophy calculations.
The VoteMatch table indicates the number of scale points from each answer (any one question can provide from 0 to 10 scale points on one scale or the other).
The combination of social/moral scales and economic scales produces a political philosophy description. A more detailed explanation appears below.
Examples
The chart below indicates how four “hard-core” political philosophers would answer the questions. From this example, you can see how the candidate fits in with each philosophy. The candidate’s answers are on the left.
A “hard-core liberal” would answer social questions to minimize government involvement, but would answer economic questions to include government intervention.
A “hard-core libertarian” would answer both social and economic questions to minimize government involvement.
A “hard-core conservative” would answer social questions to include government intervention, but would answer economic questions to minimize government involvement.
A “hard-core populist” would answer both social and economic questions with proposals that include government intervention.
= Strongly Support = Support = No Opinion = Oppose = Strongly Oppose
Social Issues
The candidate
Hard-core Liberal
Hard-core Libertarian
Hard-Core Conservative
Hard-Core Populist
Question 1. Abortion is a woman’s unrestricted right
Question 3. Comfortable with same-sex marriage
Question 8. Human needs over animal rights
Question 12. Pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens
Question 17. Stay out of Iran
Question 4. Keep God in the public sphere
Question 9. Stricter punishment reduces crime
Question 15. Expand the military
Question 16. Stricter limits on political campaign funds
Question 19. Never legalize marijuana
= Strongly Support = Support = No Opinion = Oppose = Strongly Oppose
Economic Issues
The Candidate
Hard-core Liberal
Hard-core Libertarian
Hard-Core Conservative
Hard-Core Populist
Question 2. Legally require hiring women & minorities
Question 5. Expand ObamaCare
Question 11. Higher taxes on the wealthy
Question 18. Prioritize green energy
Question 20. Stimulus better than market-led recovery
Question 6. Privatize Social Security
Question 7. Vouchers for school choice
Question 10. Absolute right to gun ownership
Question 13. Support and expand Free Trade
Question 14. Maintain US sovereignty from UN
The Candidate
Hard-core Liberal
Hard-core Libertarian
Hard-Core Conservative
Hard-Core Populist
= Strongly Support = Support = No Opinion = Oppose = Strongly Oppose
Final Notes
To ensure balance among political viewpoints, we arranged the wording of the questions so that half the time, the answer involving more government is answered by “support”, and half the time by “oppose.” Hence, each of the “hard core” philosophers would choose “support” for 5 of the Social questions and for 5 of the Economic questions.
Many of these statements cross over the line between social issues and economic issues. And many people might answer what we call a “Social” issue based on economic reasoning. But we have tried to arrange a series of questions which separates the way candidates think about government activities in these two broad scales.
The below is a way of thinking about the candidate’s political philosophy by dividing the candidate’s VoteMatch answers into “social” and “economic” questions. It is only a theory – please take it with a grain of salt!Social Questions: Liberals and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while conservatives and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictive answers.
Economic Questions: Conservatives and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while liberals and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictive answers.
Candidate’s Score
The candidate scored the following on the VoteMatch questions:
Social Score
18%
Economic Score
93%
Where the Candidate Fits In
Where the candidate’s Social score meets the Economic score on the grid below is the candidate’s political philosophy. Based on the above score, the candidate is a Hard-Core Conservative.
Social ScoreThis measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s personal lives or on social issues. These issues include health, morality, love, recreation, prayer and other activities that are not measured in dollars.
A high score (above 60%) means the candidate believes in tolerance for different people and lifestyles.
A low score (below 40%) means the candidate believes that standards of morality & safety should be enforced by government.
Economic Score
This measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s economic lives. Economic issues include retirement funding, budget allocations, and taxes.
A high score (above 60%) means the candidate believes in personal responsibility for financial matters, and that free-market competition is better for people than central planning by the government.
A low score (below 40%) means the candidate believes that a good society is best achieved by the government redistributing wealth. The candidate believes that government’s purpose is to decide which programs are good for society, and how much should be spent on each program.
This measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s economic lives. Economic issues include retirement funding, budget allocations, and taxes.
How We Score Candidates
How we determine a candidate’s stance on each VoteMatch question:
We collect up votes, excerpts from speeches, press releases, and so on, which are related to each question. Each of these are shown on the candidate’s VoteMatch table.
We assign an individual score for each item on the list. The scores can be: Strongly Favor, Favor, Neutral/Mixed, Oppose, Strongly Oppose. The scoring terms refer to the text of the question, not whether the candidate strongly opposed a bill, for example.
We then average the individual scores, using the numeric scale: Strongly Favor = 2, Favor = 1, Neutral/Mixed = 0, Oppose = -1, Strongly Oppose = -2.
If the average is above 1, the overall answer to the question is Strongly Favor.
If the average is above 0, the overall answer to the question is Favor.
If the average is exactly 0, the overall answer to the question is Neutral.
If the average is below 0, the overall answer to the question is Oppose.
If the average is below -1, the overall answer to the question is Strongly Oppose.
When you do a VoteMatch quiz, your answers are compared to each candidates’ overall answer to come up with a matching percentage.
To get the political philosophy of the candidate, we sum up the answers on two scales, the Personal/Social scale and the Economic Scale. Some questions aren’t used in the political philosophy calculations.
The VoteMatch table indicates the number of scale points from each answer (any one question can provide from 0 to 10 scale points on one scale or the other).
The combination of social/moral scales and economic scales produces a political philosophy description. A more detailed explanation appears below.
Examples
The chart below indicates how four “hard-core” political philosophers would answer the questions. From this example, you can see how the candidate fits in with each philosophy. The candidate’s answers are on the left.
A “hard-core liberal” would answer social questions to minimize government involvement, but would answer economic questions to include government intervention.
A “hard-core libertarian” would answer both social and economic questions to minimize government involvement.
A “hard-core conservative” would answer social questions to include government intervention, but would answer economic questions to minimize government involvement.
A “hard-core populist” would answer both social and economic questions with proposals that include government intervention.
= Strongly Support = Support = No Opinion = Oppose = Strongly Oppose
Social Issues
The candidate
Hard-core Liberal
Hard-core Libertarian
Hard-Core Conservative
Hard-Core Populist
Question 1. Abortion is a woman’s unrestricted right
Question 3. Comfortable with same-sex marriage
Question 8. Human needs over animal rights
Question 12. Pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens
Question 17. Stay out of Iran
Question 4. Keep God in the public sphere
Question 9. Stricter punishment reduces crime
Question 15. Expand the military
Question 16. Stricter limits on political campaign funds
Question 19. Never legalize marijuana
= Strongly Support = Support = No Opinion = Oppose = Strongly Oppose
Economic Issues
The Candidate
Hard-core Liberal
Hard-core Libertarian
Hard-Core Conservative
Hard-Core Populist
Question 2. Legally require hiring women & minorities
Question 5. Expand ObamaCare
Question 11. Higher taxes on the wealthy
Question 18. Prioritize green energy
Question 20. Stimulus better than market-led recovery
Question 6. Privatize Social Security
Question 7. Vouchers for school choice
Question 10. Absolute right to gun ownership
Question 13. Support and expand Free Trade
Question 14. Maintain US sovereignty from UN
The Candidate
Hard-core Liberal
Hard-core Libertarian
Hard-Core Conservative
Hard-Core Populist
= Strongly Support = Support = No Opinion = Oppose = Strongly Oppose
Final Notes
To ensure balance among political viewpoints, we arranged the wording of the questions so that half the time, the answer involving more government is answered by “support”, and half the time by “oppose.” Hence, each of the “hard core” philosophers would choose “support” for 5 of the Social questions and for 5 of the Economic questions.
Many of these statements cross over the line between social issues and economic issues. And many people might answer what we call a “Social” issue based on economic reasoning. But we have tried to arrange a series of questions which separates the way candidates think about government activities in these two broad scales.
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Freeman Dyson on the Global Warming Hysteria April, 2015
Freeman Dyson: A Global Warming Heretic & Denier
“…Professor Fred Singer presents the Report “Nature, not Human Activity, Rules the Climate by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change”‘(NIPCC) at CFACT’s International Climate Eco-Summit (I.C.E.), held on December 11, 2009 at the Center for Political Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark. …”
Richard Lindzen
Interview with Professor Richard Lindzen
The experts explain the global warming myth: Richard Lindzen
Richard Lindzen at International Conference on Climate Change
Richard Lindzen, Ph.D. Lecture Deconstructs Global Warming Hysteria (High Quality Version)
Roy Spencer
Global Warming / Climate Change Hoax – Dr. Roy Spencer (1)
Why Climate Models Are Wrong
Dr Roy Spencer on Global Warming Part 1 of 6
Dr Roy Spencer on Global Warming Part 2 of 6
Dr Roy Spencer on Global Warming Part 3 of 6
Dr Roy Spencer on Global Warming Part 4 of 6
Dr Roy Spencer on Global Warming Part 5 of 6
Dr Roy Spencer on Global Warming Part 6 of 6
Fred Singer
Global Warming Debate – Dr. Fred Singer (1 of 2)
Global Warming Debate – Dr. Fred Singer (2 of 2)
Professor Fred Singer on Climate Change pt 1
Professor Fred Singer on Climate Change pt 2
Unstoppable Solar Cycles
Prof. Fred Singer on Climate Change – CFACT (1 of 5)
Prof. Fred Singer on Climate Change – CFACT (2 of 5)
Prof. Fred Singer on Climate Change – CFACT (3 of 5)
Prof. Fred Singer on Climate Change – CFACT (4 of 5)
Prof. Fred Singer on Climate Change – CFACT (5 of 5)
MAJOR REDUCTIONS IN CARBON EMISSIONS ARE NOT WORTH THE MONEY 4 /14- Intelligence Squared U.S.
The Current Pope’s Advisor On Climate Change (Really?)
Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Climate change: state of play
UC San Diego Professor Advises Pope on Climate Change
How climate-change doubters lost a papal fight
By Anthony Faiola and Chris Mooney
Pope Francis was about to take a major step backing the science behind human-driven global warming, and Philippe de Larminat was determined to change his mind.
A French doubter who authored a book arguing that solar activity — not greenhouse gases — was driving global warming, de Larminat sought a spot at a climate summit in April sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Nobel laureates would be there. So would U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs and others calling for dramatic steps to curb carbon emissions.
After securing a high-level meeting at the Vatican, he was told that, space permitting, he could join. He bought a plane ticket from Paris to Rome. But five days before the April 28 summit, de Larminat said, he received an e-mail saying there was no space left. It came after other scientists — as well as the powerful Vatican bureaucrat in charge of the academy — insisted he had no business being there.
“They did not want to hear an off note,” de Larminat said.
The incident highlights how climate-change doubters tried and failed to alter the landmark papal document unveiled last week — one that saw the leader of 1 billion Catholics fuse faith and reason and come to the conclusion that “denial” is wrong.
Wearing a yellow raincoat, Pope Francis waves to the faithful as he arrives in Tacloban, Philippines, in January. (Wally Santana/AP)
It marked the latest blow for those seeking to stop the reform-minded train that has become Francis’s papacy. It is one that has reinvigorated liberal Catholics even as it has sowed the seeds of resentment and dissent inside and outside the Vatican’s ancient walls.
Yet the battle lost over climate change also suggests how hard it may be for critics to blunt the power of a man who has become something of a juggernaut in an institution where change tends to unfold over decades, even centuries. More than anything, to those who doubt the human impact of global warming, the position staked out by Francis in his papal document, known as an encyclical, means a major defeat.
“This was their Waterloo,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, who has been tracking climate-change deniers for years. “They wanted the encyclical not to happen. And it happened.”
By InfinitiGrowth in the Internet of Things promises to transform life, work and industry.READ MORE
Papal advisers say Francis signaled his intent to draft a major document on the environment soon after assuming the throne of St. Peter in March 2013. His interest in the topic dates to his days as a bishop in Buenos Aires, where Francis, officials say, was struck by the effects of floods and unsanitary conditions on Argentine shantytowns known as “misery villages.”
In January, Francis officially announced his goal of drafting the encyclical — saying after an official visit to the Philippines that he wanted to make a “contribution” to the debate ahead of a major U.N. summit on climate change in Paris in December.
But several efforts by those skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change to influence the document appear to have come considerably later — in April — and, maybe, too late.
In late April, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a free-market group that serves as a hub of skepticism regarding the science of human-caused global warming, sent a delegation to the Vatican. As a Heartland news release put it, they hoped “to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science: There is no global warming crisis!”
It was meant to coincide with the same April meeting that de Larminat was trying to attend. Heartland’s activists were not part of the invited contingent, either, Heartland communications director Jim Lakely said.
“It was a side event,” he said. “We were outside the walls of the Vatican. We were at a hotel — literally, I could throw a football into St. Peter’s Square.”
Seven scientists and other experts gave speeches at the Heartland event, raising doubts about various aspects of the scientific consensus on climate change, even as several also urged the pope not to take sides in the debate. It’s impossible to know how that influenced those in the Vatican working on the pope’s document — which one Vatican official said was at “an advanced stage.” But Lakely said his group did not see much of its argument reflected in the final document.
“We all want the poor to live better lives, but we just don’t think the solution to that is to restrict the use of fossil fuels, because we don’t think CO2 is causing a climate crisis,” Lakely said. “So if that’s our message in a sentence, that message was not reflected in the encyclical, so there you go.”
Read Pope Francis’s full document on Climate Change
n the 192-page paper released Thursday, the pope lays out the argument for a new partnership between science and religion to combat human-driven climate change — a position bringing him immediately into conflict with skeptics, whom he chides for their “denial.” And you can also read 10 key excerpts from Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment.
The father of conservative movement-building through direct mail, Richard A. Viguerie, issued a forceful denunciation of Francis, his encyclical and his priorities, calling the pope’s message on climate change “a confusing distraction that dilutes his great moral authority and leadership.”
Mr. Viguerie’s post does not address the substance of the encyclical; rather, it argues at length that the pope should not be writing about climate change “at a time when Catholics, indeed Christians of all denominations, are facing persecution” as well as “a host of moral and spiritual challenges”:
While the pope fiddles with one controversial political issue that is not at the core of spiritual matters, our spiritual culture is burning.
He goes on to assert that the Catholic clergy has “abandoned the teaching of morals” and “sees, hears, and knows few sins,” while “the liberals’ true agenda is to destroy religion” and, he says, the environmental movement has socialist roots.
Those who most fervently deny the scientific consensus on climate change have ridiculed Pope Francis. Steven Milloy, who regularly denounces climate scientists on his website and on Twitter, posted a series of strident messages after a draft of the encyclical leaked earlier this week. Mr. Milloy is linked to the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute and has also argued against the scientific studies that suggest that secondhand smoke causes cancer.
In recent Twitter posts, he called some of the leaked portions of the encyclical “adolescent, insipid, primitive, embarrassing,” as well as “a stumbling, bumbling PR disaster for Red Pope.”
Pope Francis, in Sweeping Encyclical, Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change
Pope Francis on Thursday called for a radical transformation of politics, economics and individual lifestyles to confront environmental degradation and climate change, blending a biting critique of consumerism and irresponsible development with a plea for swift and unified global action.
The vision that Francis outlined in a 184-page papal encyclical is sweeping in ambition and scope: He describes relentless exploitation and destruction of the environment and says apathy, the reckless pursuit of profits, excessive faith in technology and political shortsightedness are to blame.
The most vulnerable victims, he declares, are the world’s poorest people, who are being dislocated and disregarded.
Francis, the first pope from the developing world, used the encyclical — titled “Laudato Si’,” or “Praise Be to You” — to highlight the crisis posed byclimate change. He places most of the blame on fossil fuels and human activity, while warning of an “unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequence for all of us” if corrective action is not taken swiftly. Developed, industrialized countries were mostly responsible, he says, and are obligated to help poorer nations confront the crisis.
Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon says that the environmental crisis is a “spiritual problem,” during a news conference on Thursday about Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change.
By Reuters on Publish DateJune 18, 2015.
“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods,” he writes. “It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”
The Vatican released the encyclical at noon on Thursday, three days after an Italian magazine posted a leaked draft online, to the fury of Vaticanofficials. The breach led to speculation that opponents of Francis in the Vatican wanted to embarrass him by undermining the release.
Even so, religious figures, environmentalists, scientists, executives and elected officials around the world awaited the official release, and scheduled news conferences or issued statements afterward. News media interest was enormous, in part because of Francis’ global popularity, but also because of the intriguing coalition he is proposing between faith and science.
“Humanity is faced with a crucial challenge that requires the development of adequate policies, which, moreover, are currently being discussed on the global agenda,” Cardinal Peter Turkson said at a news conference at the Vatican. “Certainly, ‘Laudato Si’ ’ can and must have an impact on important and urgent decisions to be made in this area.”
Photo
In his encyclical, read by a nun at the Vatican on Thursday, Francis focused on the harm climate change poses to the poor.CreditMax Rossi/Reuters
Francis has made it clear that he hopes the encyclical will influence energy and economic policy and stir a global movement. He calls on ordinary people to press politicians for change. Catholic bishops and priests around the world are expected to discuss the encyclical in services on Sunday. But Francis is also reaching for a wider audience, asking in the document “to address every person living on this planet.”
Even before the encyclical, the pope’s stance against environmental destruction and his demand for global action had already thrilled many scientists. Advocates of policies to combat climate change have said they hoped that Francis could lend a “moral dimension” to the debate.
“Within the scientific community, there is almost a code of honor that you will never transgress the red line between pure analysis and moral issues,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and chairman of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “But we are now in a situation where we have to think about the consequences of our insight for society.”
Francis has been sharply criticized by those who question or deny the established science of human-caused climate change, and also by some conservative Roman Catholics, who see the encyclical as an attack on capitalism and as political meddling.
Graphic: On Planet in Distress, a Papal Call to Action
Governments are now developing domestic climate-change plans to prepare for aUnited Nations summit meeting on the issue in Paris in December. The meeting’s goal is to achieve a sweeping accord in which every nation would commit to new policies to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Many governments have yet to present plans, including major emitters like Brazil, which has a large Catholic population. The encyclical is seen as an unsubtle nudge for action.
“It gives a lot of cover to political and economic leaders in those countries, as they make decisions on climate change policy,” said Timothy Wirth, vice chairman of the United Nations Foundation.
Catholic theologians say the overarching theme of the encyclical is “integral ecology,” which links care for the environment with a notion already well developed in Catholic teaching: that economic development, to be morally good and just, must take into account people’s need for things like freedom, education and meaningful work.
“The basic idea is, in order to love God, you have to love your fellow human beings, and you have to love and care for the rest of creation,” said Vincent Miller, who holds a chair in Catholic theology and culture at the University of Dayton, a Catholic college in Ohio. “It gives Francis a very traditional basis to argue for the inclusion of environmental concern at the center of Christian faith.”
Photo
Metropolitan of Pergamon John Zizioulas, left, and Cardinal Peter Turkson presented the 184-page papal encyclical on Thursday.CreditAndrew Medichini/Associated Press
He added: “Critics will say the church can’t teach policy, the church can’t teach politics. And Francis is saying, ‘No, these things are at the core of the church’s teaching.’ ”
Francis tapped a wide variety of sources in his encyclical, partly to underscore the universality of his message. He cites passages from his two papal predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and draws prominently from a religious ally, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He also cites a ninth-century Sufi mystic, Ali al-Khawas.
“This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church,” Francis writes. The Bible teaches human beings to “till and keep” the garden of the world, he says. “ ‘Tilling’ refers to cultivating, plowing or working, while ‘keeping’ means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving.”
His most stinging rebuke is a broad critique of profit-seeking and the undue influence of technology on society. He praises achievements in medicine, science and engineering, but says that “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience.”
Central to Francis’ theme is the link between poverty and the planet’s fragility. The pope rejects the belief that technology and “current economics” will solve environmental problems, or “that the problems of global hunger and poverty will be resolved simply by market growth.”
“A huge indictment I see in this encyclical is that people have lost their sense of ultimate and proper goals of technology and economics,” said Christiana Z. Peppard, an assistant professor of theology, science and ethics at Fordham University in New York. “We are focused on short-term, consumerist patterns.”
Encyclicals are letters to the clergy and laity of the church that are considered authoritative. Catholics are expected to try to sincerely embrace their teachings. But more specific assertions in them can be categorized as “prudential judgments,” a phrase that some critics have invoked to reject Francis’ positions on issues like climate change or economic inequality.
Many conservatives will be pleased with the encyclical’s strong criticism of abortion, and its dismissal of arguments that population control can be an answer to poverty. However, Francis sharply criticizes the trading of carbon credits — a market-based system central to the European Union’s climate policy — and says it “may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”
Above all, Francis frames the encyclical as a call to action. He praises young people for being ready for change, and said “enforceable international agreements are urgently needed.” He cites Benedict in saying that advanced societies “must be prepared to encourage more sober lifestyles, while reducing their energy consumption and improving its efficiency.”
“All is not lost,” he writes. “Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start.”
St. Francis of Assisi’s hymn Laudato Si’ spoke of “Brothers” Sun and Fire and “Sisters” Moon and Water, using these colorful phrases figuratively, as a way of praising God’s creation. These sentimental words so touched Pope Francis that he named his encyclical after this canticle (repeated in paragraph 87 of the Holy Father’s letter).
Neither Pope Francis nor St. Francis took the words literally, of course. Neither believed that fire was alive and could be talked to or reasoned with or, worse, worshiped. Strange, then, that a self-professed atheist and scientific advisor to the Vatican named Hans Schellnhuber appears to believe in a Mother Earth.
Gaia
The Gaia Principle, first advanced by chemist James Lovelock (who has lately had second thoughts) and microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, says that all life interacts with the Earth, and the Earth with all life, to form a giant self-regulating, living system.
This goes far beyond the fact that the Earth’s climate system has feedbacks, which are at the very center of the debate over climate change. In the Gaia Principle, Mother Earth is alive, and even, some think, aware in some ill-defined, mystical way. The Earth knows man and his activities and, frankly, isn’t too happy with him.
This is what we might call “scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine — a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God.
What’s this have to do with Schellnhuber? In the 1999 Nature paper “‘Earth system’ analysis and the second Copernican revolution,” he said:
Ecosphere science is therefore coming of age, lending respectability to its romantic companion, Gaia theory, as pioneered by Lovelock and Margulis. This hotly debated ‘geophysiological’ approach to Earth-system analysis argues that the biosphere contributes in an almost cognizant way to self-regulating feedback mechanisms that have kept the Earth’s surface environment stable and habitable for life.
Geo-physiological, in case you missed it. Cognizant, in black and white. So dedicated is Schellnhuber to this belief that he says “the Gaia approach may even include the influence of biospheric activities on the Earth’s plate-tectonic processes.” Not the other way around, mind you, where continental drift and earthquakes effects life, but where life effects earthquakes.
He elaborates:
Although effects such as the glaciations may still be interpreted as over-reactions to small disturbances — a kind of cathartic geophysiological fever — the main events, resulting in accelerated maturation by shock treatment, indicate that Gaia faces a powerful antagonist. Rampino has proposed personifying this opposition as Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.
Mother Earth gets the flu and instead of white blood cells and a rise in temperature to fend off the infection, it sends white ice and a decrease in temperatures. How? Geophysiologically! I remind the reader that our author, writing in one of the world’s most prominent science journals, does not use these propositions metaphorically. He proposes them as actual mechanisms.
Schellnhuber echoes the theme of a cognizant, i.e. self-aware, planet in another (co-authored) 2004 paper in Nature 2004, “Climbing the co-evolution ladder,” suggesting again that mankind is an infection, saying that mankind “perturbs … the global ‘metabolism’” of the planet.
Tipping Points
Schellnhuber, a one-time quantum physicist who turned his attention to Mother Earth late in his career, was also co-author of a 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper “Imprecise probability assessment of tipping points in the climate system,” which asked select scientists their gut assessment about the arrival of various “tipping points.” Tipping points are a theme of Schellnhuber’s research (see inter aliathis and this).
Tipping points are supposed moments when some doom which might have been avoided if some action had been taken, is no longer possible to avoid and will arrive no matter what. Tipping points have come and gone in climate forecasts for decades now. The promised dooms never arrive but the false prophets never quit. Their intent is less to forecast than to induce something short of panic in order to plead for political intervention. When the old tipping point is past, theorists just change the date, issue new warnings and hope no one will notice.
One of the tipping points Schellnhuber asked about was the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, depending on what the temperature did. All of the selected experts (who answered the questions in 2004 and 2005) gave moderate (~15-25%) to quite high probabilities (50-80%) for this event to have occurred by 2015. The ice did not melt.
Schellnhuber presented more tipping points to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2014 in the co-authored paper, “Climate-System Tipping Points and Extreme Weather Events.” In that paper, Schellnhuber has a “scientific” graph with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Adam “flicking” a planet earth over a methane tipping point, such that the earth would roll down into a fiery pit labeled the “Warming Abyss.” Hell on earth.
The Problem of People
Schellnhuber is most famous for predicting that the “carrying capacity” of the earth is “below” 1 billion people. When confronted with this, he called those who quoted him “liars.” But he then repeated the same claim, saying, “All I said was that if we had unlimited global warming of eight degrees warming, maybe the carrying capacity of the earth would go down to just 1 billion, and then the discussion would be settled.” And he has often said that this temperature tipping point would be reached — unless “actions” were taken.
The man is suspicious of people. In that same interview he said, “If you want to reduce human population, there are wonderful means: Improve the education of girls and young women.” Since young women already know where babies come from, and since this knowledge tends neither to increase nor decrease population, the “education” he has in mind must be facts about how to avoid the consequences of sex. Austin Ruse discovered a 2009 talk in which Schellnhuber said the earth “will explode” due to resource depletion once the population reaches 9 billion, a number that the UN projects in 2050. Presumably he wants earth to avoid that fate, so he mustsupport the population control that Pope Francis so clearly repudiated in his encyclical.
Bad Religion
Confirmation bias happens when a scientist manipulates an experiment so that he gets the outcome he hoped he would get. When Schellnhuber invites only believers in tipping-points-of-doom to characterize their guesses of this doom, his view that the doom is real will be confirmed. And when he publishes a paper that says, “Scientists say world is doomed” the public and politicians believe it. Scientists skeptical of the doom are dismissed because they are skeptics. This isn’t good science. It’s really bad religion, and a pagan one at that.
Global warming research is characterized by an insider’s club. If you believe, you’re in. If you doubt, you’re out. This is also so at the Pontifical Academies of Science where Schellnhuber was appointed by Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo. The bishop locked scientists with contrary views out of the process, scientists he has repeatedly dismissed as “funded by the oil industry.” Given this, how likely is it that the Holy Father was fully aware of the views of the chief scientist who advised him?
Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
“…On June 2, as Congress debated global warming legislation that would raise energy costs to consumers by hundreds of billions of dollars, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released an 880-page book challenging the scientific basis of concerns that global warming is either man-made or would have harmful effects.
In “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC),” coauthors Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso and 35 contributors and reviewers present an authoritative and detailed rebuttal of the findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress rely for their regulatory proposals.
The scholarship in this book demonstrates overwhelming scientific support for the position that the warming of the twentieth century was moderate and not unprecedented, that its impact on human health and wildlife was positive, and that carbon dioxide probably is not the driving factor behind climate change.
The authors cite thousands of peer-reviewed research papers and books that were ignored by the IPCC, plus additional scientific research that became available after the IPCC’s self-imposed deadline of May 2006.
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is an international panel of nongovernment scientists and scholars who have come together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change. Because it is not a government agency, and because its members are not predisposed to believe climate change is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, NIPCC is able to offer an independent “second opinion” of the evidence reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). …”
Story 1: Rand Paul Running — Libertarian and Fiscal Conservative Republicans and Independents Will Vote For Him — Big Government Republicans, Neoconservatives and Progressive Democrats Demonize and Fear Him — Can He Beat Senator Ted Cruz? — Time Will Tell — Two Clues For Rand Paul — Videos
Freedom lies in being bold.
Robert Frost
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
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Transcript: Read Full Text of Sen. Rand Paul’s Campaign Launch
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul launched his presidential campaign in Louisville Tuesday.
I have a message, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We have come to take our country back.
We have come to take our country back from the special interests that use Washington as their personal piggy bank, the special interests that are more concerned with their personal welfare than the general welfare.
The Washington machine that gobbles up our freedoms and invades every nook and cranny of our lives must be stopped.
Less than five years ago I stood just down the road in home town in Bowling Green and said those same words. I wasn’t supposed to win, no one thought I would.
PHOTOS: ON THE ROAD WITH RAND PAUL
Charles Ommanney for TIME
Senator Rand Paul talks to voters at the Horry County Republican Party in Myrtle Beach, S.C. on Sept. 30th, 2014.
Some people asked me, then why are you running? The answer is the same now as it was then. I have a vision for America. I want to be part of a return to prosperity, a true economic boom that lists all Americans, a return to a government restrained by the Constitution.
A return to privacy, opportunity, liberty. Too often when Republicans have won we have squandered our victory by becoming part of the Washington machine. That’s not who I am.
That’s not why I ran for office the first time just a few years ago. The truth is, I love my life as a small-town doctor. Every day I woke up, I felt lucky to be able to do the things I loved. More importantly, I was blessed to be able to do things that made a difference in people’s lives.
I never could have done any of this, though, without the help of my parents who are here today. I’d like you to join me and thank my mother and dad.
With my parents’ help, I was able to make it through long years of medical training to become an eye surgeon. For me there is nothing that compares with helping someone see better. Last August I was privileged to travel to Guatemala on a medical mission trip together with a team of surgeons from across the U.S.
We operated on more than 200 people who were blind or nearly blind from cataracts. I was grateful to be able to put my scrubs back on, peer into the oculars of the microscope, and focus on the task at hand, to take a surgical approach to fix a problem.
One day in Guatemala, a man arrived and told me that I’d operated on his wife the day before. His wife could see clearly for the first time in years, and she had begged him to get on the bus, travel the winding roads and come back to our surgery center. He too was nearly blind from hardened cataracts.
After his surgery, the next day, his wife sat next to me. As I unveiled the patch from his eyes, it was a powerful emotional moment for me to see them looking at each other clearly for the first time years to see the face they loved again.
As I saw the joy in their eyes, I thought, “This is why I became a doctor.”
In that moment, I also remembered my grandmother, who inspired me to become an eye surgeon. She spent hours with me as a kid. We would sort through her old coin collection, looking for wheat pennies and Indian heads. But as her vision began to fail, I became her eyes to inspect the faintness of the mint marks on the old weather-worn coins.
I went with my grandmother to the ophthalmologist as she had her corneas replaced. I was also with her when she received the sad news that macular generation had done irreparable harm to her eyes.
My hope… my hope that my grandmother would see again made me want to become an eye surgeon, to make a difference in people’s lives.
I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been able to enjoy the American Dream.
I worry, though, that the opportunity and hope are slipping away for our sons and daughters. As I watch our once-great economy collapse under mounting spending and debt, I think, “What kind of America will our grandchildren see”?
It seems to me that both parties and the entire political system are to blame.
Big government and debt doubled under a Republican administration.
And it’s now tripling under Barack Obama’s watch. President Obama is on course to add more debt than all of the previous presidents combined.
We borrow a million dollars a minute. This vast accumulation of debt threatens not just our economy, but our security.
We can wake up now and do the right thing. Quit spending money we don’t have.
This message of liberty is for all Americans, Americans from all walks of life. The message of liberty, opportunity and justice is for all Americans, whether you wear a suit, a uniform or overalls, whether you’re white or black, rich or poor.
In order to restore America, one thing is for certain, though: We cannot, we must not dilute our message or give up on our principles.
If we nominate a candidate who is simply Democrat Light, what’s the point?
Why bother?
We need to boldly proclaim our vision for America. We need to go boldly forth under the banner of liberty that clutches the Constitution in one hand and the Bill of Rights in the other.
Washington is horribly broken. I fear it can’t be fixed from within. We the people must rise up and demand action.
Congress will never balance the budget unless you force them to do so. Congress has an abysmal record with balancing anything. Our only recourse is to force Congress to balance the budget with a constitutional amendment.
I have been to Washington, and let me tell you, there is no monopoly on knowledge there.
I ran for office because we have too many career politicians. I believe it now more than ever.
We limit the President to two terms. It’s about time we limit the terms of Congress!
I want to reform Washington. I want common sense rules that will break the logjam in Congress.
That’s why I introduced a Read the Bills Act.
The bills are thousands of pages long. And no one reads them. They are often plopped on our desks only a few hours before a vote.
I’ve proposed something truly extraordinary — Let’s read the bills, every page!
The bills are 1,000 pages long and no one reads them. They are often plopped on our desk with only a few hours before a vote, so I propose something truly extraordinary. Let’s read the bills every day.
From the time I was a very young boy I was taught to love and appreciate America. Love of liberty pulses in my veins not because we have beautiful mountains or white sand beaches, although we do, and not because of our abundance of resources. It’s more visceral than that. Our great nation was founded upon the extraordinary notion that government should be restrained and freedom should be maximized.
America, to me, is that beacon. We are unique among the nations that our — that our country stands for freedom. Freedom nurtured our country from a rebellious group of colonies into the world’s greatest nation.
When tyranny threatened the world America led the way to rid the world of Nazis and fascist regimes. Resolutely we stood decade after decade against Communism, the engine of capitalism finally winning out against the sputtering, incompetent engine of socialism.
We won the Cold War.
America and freedom are so intertwined that people literally are dying to come here. The freedom we have fostered in America have unleashed genius and advancement like never before. Yet our great nation still needs new ideas and new answers to old problems.
From an early age I worked. I taught swimming lessons, I mowed lawns, I did landscaping, I put roofs on houses, I painted houses. I never saw work though as punishment. Who always gave me a sense of who I am.
Self-esteem cant be given; it must be earned.
Work is not punishment; work is the reward.
Two of my sons work minimum wage jobs while they go to college. I am proud of them as I see them realize the value of hard work. I can see their self-esteem grow as they cash their paychecks. I have a vision for America where everyone who wants to work will have a job.
Many Americans though are being left behind. The reward of work seems beyond their grasp. Under the watch of both parties, the poor seem to get poorer and the rich get richer. Trillion-dollar government stimulus packages has only widened the income gap.
Politically connected crones get taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of millions and poor families across America continue to suffer. I have a different vision, an ambitious vision, an ambitious vision, a vision that will offer opportunity to all Americans, especially those who have been left behind.
My plan includes economic freedom zones to allow impoverished areas like Detroit, West Louisville, Eastern Kentucky to prosper by leaving more money in the pockets of the people who live there.
Can you imagine what a billion-dollar stimulus could do for Detroit or for Appalachia? I’m convinced that most Americans want to work. I want to free up the great engine of American prosperity.
I want to see millions of Americans back at work. In my vision for America, we’ll bring back manufacturing jobs that pay well. How? We’ll dramatically lower the tax on American companies that wish to bring their profits home.
More than $2 trillion in American profit currently sits overseas. In my vision for America, new highways and bridges will be built across the country, not by raising your taxes, but by lowering the tax to bring this American profit home.
Even in this polarized Congress, we have a chance of passing this. I say let’s bring $2 trillion home to America, let’s bring it home now.
Liberal policies have failed our inner cities. Let’s just get the facts straight. They have failed our inner cities. Our schools are not equal, and the poverty gap continues to widen. Martin Luther King spoke of two Americas. He described them as two starkly different American experiences that exist side-by-side.
In one in America, people experience the opportunity of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the other America, people experience a daily ugliness that dashes hope and leaves only the fatigue of despair.
Although I was born into the America that experiences and believes in opportunity, my trips to Detroit, to Appalachia, to Chicago have revealed what I call an undercurrent of unease.
It’s time for a new way, a way predicated on justice, opportunity and freedom.
Those of us who have enjoyed the American dream must break down the wall that separates us from the other America. I want all our children to have the same opportunities that I had. We need to stop limiting kids in poor neighborhoods to failing public schools and offer them school choice.
It won’t happen, though, unless we realize that we can’t borrow our way to prosperity. Currently some $3 trillion comes into the U.S. Treasury. Couldn’t the country just survive on $3 trillion?
I propose we do something extraordinary. Let’s just spend what comes in.
In my vision for America, freedom and prosperity at home can only be achieved if we defend against enemies who are dead set on attacking us.
Without question we must defend ourselves and American interests from our enemies, but until we name the enemy, we can’t win the war.
The enemy is radical Islam. You can’t get around it.
And not only will I name the enemy, I will do whatever it takes to defend America from these haters of mankind.
We need a national defense robust enough to defend against all attack, modern enough to deter all enemies, and nimble enough to defend our vital interests. But we also need a foreign policy that protects American interests and encourages stability, not chaos.
At home, conservatives understand that government is the problem, not the solution.
Conservatives should not succumb, though, to the notion that a government inept at home will somehow succeed in building nations abroad.
I envision an America with a national defense unparalleled, undefeatable and unencumbered by overseas nation-building.
I envision a national defense that promotes, as Reagan put it, peace through strength.
I believe in applying Reagan’s approach to foreign policy to the Iran issue. Successful negotiations with untrustworthy adversaries are only achieved from a position of strength.
We’ve brought Iran to the table through sanctions that I voted for. Now we must stay strong. That’s why I’ve cosponsored legislation that ensures that any deal between the U.S. and Iran must be approved by Congress.
Not — not only is that good policy, it’s the law.
It concerns me that the Iranians have a different interpretation of the agreement. They’re putting out statement that say completely the opposite of what we’re saying. It concerns me that we may attempt, or the president may attempt, to unilaterally and prematurely halt sanctions.
I will oppose any deal that does not end Iran’s nuclear ambitions and have strong verification measures.
And I will insist that the final version be brought before Congress.
The difference between President Obama and myself, he seems to think you can negotiate from a position of weakness. Yet everyone needs to realize that negotiations are not inherently bad. The trust (inaudible) verify is required in any negotiation, but then our goal always should be and always is peace, not war.
We must realize, though, that we do not project strength by borrowing money from China to send it to Pakistan.
Let’s quit building bridges in foreign countries and use that money to build some bridges here at home.
It angers me to see mobs burning our flag and chanting “Death to America” in countries that receive millions of dollars in our foreign aid.
I say it must end. I say not one penny more to these haters of America.
To defend our country, we do need to gather intelligence on the enemy. But when the intelligence director is not punished for lying under oath, how are we to trust our government agencies?
Warrantless searches of Americans’ phones and computer records are un-American and a threat to our civil liberties.
I say that your phone records are yours. I say the phone records of law-abiding citizens are none of their damn business.
Is this where we light up the phones?
The president created this vast dragnet by executive order. And as president on day one, I will immediately end this unconstitutional surveillance.
I believe we can have liberty and security and I will not compromise your liberty for a false sense of security, not now, not ever.
We must defend ourselves, but we must never give up who we are as a people. We must never diminish the Bill of Rights as we fight this long war against evil. We must believe in our founding documents. We must protect economic and personal liberty again.
America has much greatness left in her. We are still exceptional and we are still a beacon for the world. We will thrive when we believe in ourselves again.
I see an America strong enough to deter foreign aggression, yet wise enough to avoid unnecessary intervention.
I see an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed.
I see an America with a restrained IRS that cannot target, cannot harass American citizens for their political or religious beliefs.
I see our big cities once again shining and beckoning with creativity and ingenuity, with American companies offering American jobs. With your help, this message will ring from coast to coast, a message of liberty, justice and personal responsibility. Today begins the journey to take America back.
To rescue a great country now adrift, join me as together we seek a new vision for America. Today I announce with God’s help, with the help of liberty lovers everywhere, that I am putting myself forward as a candidate for president of the United States of America.
Rothbard provides a succinct account of the origins of money, showing how money must originate from a commodity. Banking originated from goldsmiths, who issued warehouse receipts for gold deposited with them. From this a fractional reserve system developed, inherently prone to monetary expansion and panic.
In the late nineteenth century, a movement toward bank centralization arose among both “progressives” and bankers, the latter eager to increase their profits. From these plans, the Federal Reserve System developed. Rothbard shows the dominate influence of the banking House of Morgan at the Fed’s inception. During the New Deal, Rockefeller interests took first place in influence, with the Morgan interests reduced to a subordinate though still potent role.
The book concludes with an account of the Fed’s role in causing inflation and the business cycle. Abolition of this nefarious agency must be part of any agenda for genuine financial reform.
Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard
Murray Rothbard is widely known for his vast literary output, but a great deal of his work has never been published until now. During the late 1950s and early 60s he worked for the William Volker Fund, one of the few organizations willing to fund classical liberal scholars at the time. In that capacity, he wrote memos and reviews that offer insights on history, economics, foreign policy, and political theory.
Rothbard’s view and understanding of world events was unique and prescient. Strictly Confidential is an illuminating commentary on the feisty early years of the libertarian movement, and the fledgling intellectual base that became the root of today’s libertarianism.
A prolific author and Austrian economist, Murray Rothbard promoted a form of free market anarchism he called “anarcho-capitalism.”
In this talk, given at the 1981 National Libertarian Party Convention, Rothbard tells the story of how he came to learn about economics and libertarianism as he grew up in the Bronx and attended Columbia University in the 1930s and 40s. He reminisces about meeting Frank Chodorov, Baldy Harper, George Stigler and Ludwig von Mises, and takes a number of audience questions.
The Future of Austrian Economics | Murray N. Rothbard
This is the famous speech by Murray Rothbard given in the days following the collapse of the Soviet empire. His exuberance is palpable has he explains the meaning of it all for the place of liberty in the history of civilization.
A brilliant scholar and passionate defender of Liberty, Professor Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) was dean of the Austrian School of economics, holder of the S.J. Hall Chair at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Academic Vice President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
The author of 17 books and thousands of articles, the foremost Misesian economist, the father of modern freedom theory, and the most delightful personality in the profession, this great teacher here spellbinds an audience of students, faculty, and business leaders in the “Future of Austrian Economics,” at the 1990 Mises University at Stanford.
Only Austrian economics, Rothbard shows, can explain the collapse of socialism/communism and tell us what should replace it: laissez-faire capitalism. There is a lesson here as well, he shows, for dealing with the Leviathan in Washington, D.C.
The Founding of the Federal Reserve | Murray N. Rothbard
Libertarianism | Murray N. Rothbard
Murray Rothbard: Six Stages of the Libertarian Movement
Murray Rothbard – The Government Is Not Us
The Gold Standard Before the Civil War | Murray N. Rothbard
Rothbard on the ‘best’ US president
Keynes the Man: Hero or Villain? | Murray N. Rothbard
415. Murray Rothbard: Who He Was and Why He’s Important
Gene Epstein: Murray Rothbard’s Mixed Legacy
How Murray Rothbard Changed my Mind on War | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Murray Rothbard as Academic Role Model | Gary North
A prolific author and Austrian economist, Murray Rothbard promoted a form of free market anarchism he called “anarcho-capitalism.”
In this talk, given at the 1981 National Libertarian Party Convention, Rothbard tells the story of how he came to learn about economics and libertarianism as he grew up in the Bronx and attended Columbia University in the 1930s and 40s. He reminisces about meeting Frank Chodorov, Baldy Harper, George Stigler and Ludwig von Mises, and takes a number of audience questions.
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Introduction) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 1, 1/2 ) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 1, 2/2 ) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 2, 1/2 ) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 2, 2/2 ) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 3, 1/2 ) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 3, 2/2 ) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 4, 1/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 4, 2/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 5, 1/3) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 5, 2/3) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 5, 3/3) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 6, 1/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 6, 2/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 7) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 8) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 9, 1/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 9, 2/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 10, 1/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 10, 2/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 11, 1/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 11, 2/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 12) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 13) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 14) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 15) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 16, 1/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 16, 2/2) by Murray N. Rothbard
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Chapter 17) by Murray N. Rothbard
Background Articles and Videos
Why I Wrote My Histories of Thought
by Murray N. Rothbard
“…As the subtitle declares, this work is an overall history of economic thought from a frankly “Austrian” standpoint: that is, from the point of view of an adherent of the “Austrian School” of economics. This is the only such work by a modern Austrian; indeed, only a few monographs in specialized areas of the history of thought have been published by Austrians in recent decades.[1] Not only that: this perspective is grounded in what is currently the least fashionable though not the least numerous variant of the Austrian School: the “Misesian” or “praxeologic.”[2]
But the Austrian nature of this work is scarcely its only singularity. When the present author first began studying economics in the 1940s, there was an overwhelmingly dominant paradigm in the approach to the history of economic thought – one that is still paramount, though not as baldly as in that era. Essentially, this paradigm features a few Great Men as the essence of the history of economic thought, with Adam Smith as the almost superhuman founder.
But if Smith was the creator of both economic analysis and of the free trade, free market tradition in political economy, it would be petty and niggling to question seriously any aspect of his alleged achievement. Any sharp criticism of Smith as either economist or free market advocate would seem only anachronistic: looking down upon the pioneering founder from the point of view of the superior knowledge of today, puny descendants unfairly bashing the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
If Adam Smith created economics, much as Athena sprang full-grown and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, then his predecessors must be foils, little men of no account. And so short shrift was given, in these classic portrayals of economic thought, to anyone unlucky enough to precede Smith. Generally they were grouped into two categories and brusquely dismissed.
Immediately preceding Smith were the mercantilists, whom he strongly criticized. Mercantilists were apparently boobs who kept urging people to accumulate money but not to spend it, or insisting that the balance of trade must “balance” with each country.
Scholastics were dismissed even more rudely, as moralistic medieval ignoramuses who kept warning that the “just” price must cover a merchant’s cost of production plus a reasonable profit.
The classic works in the history of thought of the 1930s and 1940s then proceeded to expound and largely to celebrate a few peak figures after Smith. Ricardo systematized Smith, and dominated economics until the l870s; then the “marginalists,” Jevons, Menger and Walras, marginally corrected Smith-Ricardo “classical economics” by stressing the importance of the marginal unit as compared to whole classes of goods.
Then it was onto Alfred Marshall, who sagely integrated Ricardian cost theory with the supposedly one-sided Austrian-Jevonian emphasis on demand and utility, to create modern neoclassical economics. Karl Marx could scarcely be ignored, and so he was treated in a chapter as an aberrant Ricardian.
And so the historian could polish off his story by dealing with four or five Great Figures, each of whom, with the exception of Marx, contributed more building blocks toward the unbroken progress of economic science, essentially a story of ever onward and upward into the light.[3]
In the post-World War II years, Keynes of course was added to the Pantheon, providing a new culminating chapter in the progress and development of the science. Keynes, beloved student of the great Marshall, realized that the old man had left out what would later be called “macroeconomics” in his exclusive emphasis on the micro.
And so Keynes added macro, concentrating on the study and explanation of unemployment, a phenomenon which everyone before Keynes had unaccountably left out of the economic picture, or had conveniently swept under the rug by blithely “assuming full employment.”
Since then, the dominant paradigm has been largely sustained, although matters have recently become rather cloudy. For one thing, this kind of Great Man ever-upward history requires occasional new final chapters. Keynes’s General Theory, published in 1936, is now almost sixty years old; surely there must be a Great Man for a final chapter? But who? For a while, Schumpeter, with his modern and seemingly realistic stress on “innovation,” had a run, but this trend came a cropper, perhaps on the realization that Schumpeter’s fundamental work (or “vision,” as he himself perceptively put it) was written more than two decades before the General Theory.
The years since the 1950s have been murky; and it is difficult to force a return to the once-forgotten Walras into the Procrustean bed of continual progress.
My own view of the grave deficiency of the Few Great Men approach has been greatly influenced by the work of two splendid historians of thought. One is my own dissertation mentor Joseph Dorfman, whose unparalleled multi-volume work on the history of American economic thought demonstrated conclusively how important allegedly “lesser” figures are in any movement of ideas. In the first place, the stuff of history is left out by omitting these figures, and history is therefore falsified by selecting and worrying over a few scattered texts to constitute The History of Thought.
Second, a large number of the supposedly secondary figures contributed a great deal to the development of thought, in some ways more than the few peak thinkers. Hence, important features of economic thought get omitted, and the developed theory is made paltry and barren as well as lifeless.
Furthermore, the cut-and-thrust of history itself, the context of the ideas and movements, how people influenced each other, and how they reacted to and against one another, is necessarily left out of the Few Great Men approach. This aspect of the historian’s work was particularly brought home to me by Quentin Skinner’s notable two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought, the significance of which could be appreciated without adopting Skinner’s own behaviorist methodology.[4]
The continual progress, onward-and-upward approach was demolished for me, and should have been for everyone, by Thomas Kuhn’s famed Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[5] Kuhn paid no attention to economics, but instead, in the standard manner of philosophers and historians of science, focused on such ineluctably “hard” sciences as physics, chemistry, and astronomy.
Bringing the word “paradigm” into intellectual discourse, Kuhn demolished what I like to call the “Whig theory of the history of science.” The Whig theory, subscribed to by almost all historians of science, including economics, is that scientific thought progresses patiently, one year after another developing, sifting, and testing theories, so that science marches onward and upward, each year, decade, or generation learning more and possessing ever more correct scientific theories.
On analogy with the Whig theory of history, coined in mid-nineteenth-century England, which maintained that things are always getting (and therefore must get) better and better, the Whig historian of science, seemingly on firmer ground than the regular Whig historian, implicitly or explicitly asserts that “later is always better” in any particular scientific discipline. The Whig historian (whether of science or of history proper) really maintains that, for any point of historical time, “whatever was, was right,” or at least better than “whatever was earlier.”
The inevitable result is a complacent and infuriating Panglossian optimism. In the historiography of economic thought, the consequence is the firm if implicit position that every individual economist, or at least every school of economists, contributed their important mite to the inexorable upward march. There can, then, be no such thing as gross systemic error that deeply flawed, or even invalidated, an entire school of economic thought, much less sent the world of economics permanently astray.
Kuhn, however, shocked the philosophic world by demonstrating that this is simply not the way that science has developed. Once a central paradigm is selected, there is no testing or sifting, and tests of basic assumptions only take place after a series of failures and anomalies in the ruling paradigm has plunged the science into a “crisis situation.” One need not adopt Kuhn’s nihilistic philosophic outlook, his implication that no one paradigm is or can be better than any other, to realize that his less than starry-eyed view of science rings true both as history and as sociology.
But if the standard romantic or Panglossian view does not work even in the hard sciences, a fortiori it must be totally off the mark in such a “soft science” as economics, in a discipline where there can be no laboratory testing, and where numerous even softer disciplines such as politics, religion, and ethics necessarily impinge on one’s economic outlook.
There can therefore be no presumption whatever in economics that later thought is better than earlier, or even that all well-known economists have contributed their sturdy mite to the developing discipline. For it becomes very likely that, rather than everyone contributing to an ever-progressing edifice, economics can and has proceeded in contentious, even zigzag fashion, with later systemic fallacy sometimes elbowing aside earlier but sounder paradigms, thereby redirecting economic thought down a total erroneous or even tragic path. The overall path of economics may be up, or it may be down, over any given time period.
In recent years, economics, under the dominant influence of formalism, positivism and econometrics, and preening itself on being a hard science, has displayed little interest in its own past. It has been intent, as in any “real” science, on the latest textbook or journal article rather than on exploring its own history. After all, do contemporary physicists spend much time poring over eighteenth-century optics?
In the last decade or two, however, the reigning Walrasian-Keynesian neoclassical formalist paradigm has been called ever more into question, and a veritable Kuhnian “crisis situation” has developed in various areas of economics, including worry over its methodology. Amidst this situation, the study of the history of thought has made a significant comeback, one which we hope and expect will expand in coming years.[6]
For if knowledge buried in paradigms lost can disappear and be forgotten over time, then studying older economists and schools of thought need not be done merely for antiquarian purposes or to examine how intellectual life proceeded in the past. Earlier economists can be studied for their important contributions to forgotten and therefore new knowledge today. Valuable truths can be learned about the content of economics, not only from the latest journals, but from the texts of long-deceased economic thinkers.
But these are merely methodological generalizations. The concrete realization that important economic knowledge had been lost over time came to me from absorbing the great revision of the Scholastics that developed in the l950s and 1960s. The pioneering revision came dramatically in Schumpeter’s great History of Economic Analysis, and was developed in the works of Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, and John T. Noonan.
It turns out that the Scholastics were not simply “medieval,” but began in the thirteenth century and expanded and flourished through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century. Far from being cost-of-production moralists, the Scholastics believed that the just price was whatever price was established on the “common estimate” of the free market. Not only that: far from being naïve labor or cost-of-production value theorists, the Scholastics may be considered “proto-Austrians,” with a sophisticated subjective utility theory of value and price.
Furthermore, some of the Scholastics were far superior to current formalist microeconomics in developing a “proto-Austrian” dynamic theory of entrepreneurship. Moreover, in “macro,” the Scholastics, beginning with Buridan and culminating in the sixteenth-century Spanish Scholastics, worked out an “Austrian” rather than monetarist supply and demand theory of money and prices, including interregional money flows, and even a purchasing-power parity theory of exchange rates.
It seems to be no accident that this dramatic revision of our knowledge of the Scholastics was brought to American economists, not generally esteemed for their depth of knowledge of Latin, by European-trained economists steeped in Latin, the language in which the Scholastics wrote. This simple point emphasizes another reason for loss of knowledge in the modern world: the insularity in one’s own language (particularly severe in the English-speaking countries) that has, since the Reformation, ruptured the once Europe-wide community of scholars. One reason why continental economic thought has often exerted minimal, or at least delayed, influence in England and the United States is simply because these works had not been translated into English.[7]
For me, the impact of Scholastic revisionism was complemented and strengthened by the work, during the same decades, of the German-born “Austrian” historian, Emil Kauder. Kauder revealed that the dominant economic thought in France and Italy during the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth centuries was also “proto-Austrian,” emphasizing subjective utility and relative scarcity as the determinants of value. From this groundwork, Kauder proceeded to a startling insight into the role of Adam Smith that, however, follows directly from his own work and that of the Scholastic revisionists: that Smith, far from being the founder of economics, was virtually the reverse. On the contrary, Smith actually took the sound, and almost fully developed, proto-Austrian subjective value tradition, and tragically shunted economics on to a false path, a dead end from which the Austrians had to rescue economics a century later.
Instead of subjective value, entrepreneurship, and emphasis on real market pricing and market activity, Smith dropped all this and replaced it with a labor theory of value and a dominant focus on the unchanging long-run “natural price” equilibrium, a world where entrepreneurship was assumed out of existence. Under Ricardo, this unfortunate shift in focus was intensified and systematized.
If Smith was not the creator of economic theory, neither was he the founder of laissez faire in political economy. Not only were the Scholastics analysts of, and believers in, the free market and critics of government intervention, but the French and Italian economists of the eighteenth century were even more laissez-faire-oriented than Smith, who introduced numerous waffles and qualifications into what had been, in the hands of Turgot and others, an almost pure championing of laissez faire. It turns out that, rather than someone who should be venerated as creator of modern economics or of laissez faire, Smith was closer to the picture portrayed by Paul Douglas in the 1926 Chicago commemoration of the Wealth of Nations: a necessary precursor of Karl Marx.
Emil Kauder’s contribution was not limited to his portrayal of Adam Smith as the destroyer of a previously sound tradition of economic theory, as the founder of an enormous “zag” in a Kuhnian picture of a zigzag history of economic thought. Also fascinating if more speculative was Kauder’s estimate of the essential cause of a curious asymmetry in the course of economic thought in different countries.
Why is it, for example, that the subjective utility tradition flourished on the Continent, especially in France and Italy, and then revived particularly in Austria, whereas the labor and cost-of-production theories developed especially in Great Britain? Kauder attributed the difference to the profound influence of religion: the Scholastics, and then France, Italy, and Austria were Catholic countries, and Catholicism emphasized consumption as the goal of production and consumer utility and enjoyment as, at least in moderation, valuable activities and goals.
The British tradition, on the contrary, beginning with Smith himself, was Calvinist, and reflected the Calvinist emphasis on hard work and labor toil as not only good but a great good in itself, whereas consumer enjoyment is at best a necessary evil, a mere requisite to continuing labor and production.
On reading Kauder, I considered this view a challenging insight, but essentially an unproven speculation. However, as I continued studying economic thought and embarked on writing these volumes, I concluded that Kauder was being confirmed many times over. Even though Smith was a “moderate” Calvinist, he was a staunch one nevertheless, and I came to the conclusion that the Calvinist emphasis could account, for example, for Smith’s otherwise puzzling championing of usury laws, as well as his shift in emphasis from the capricious, luxury-loving consumer as the determinant of value, to the virtuous laborer embedding his hours of toil into the value of his material product.
But if Smith could be accounted for by Calvinism, what of the Spanish-Portuguese Jew-turned-Quaker, David Ricardo, surely no Calvinist? Here it seems to me that recent research into the dominant role of James Mill as mentor of Ricardo and major founder of the “Ricardian system” comes strongly into play. For Mill was a Scotsman ordained as a Presbyterian minister and steeped in Calvinism; the fact that, later in life, Mill moved to London and became an agnostic had no effect on the Calvinist nature of Mill’s basic attitudes toward life and the world. Mill’s enormous evangelical energy, his crusading for social betterment, and his devotion to labor toil (as well as the cognate Calvinist virtue of thrift) reflected his lifelong Calvinist world-outlook. John Stuart Mill’s resurrection of Ricardianism may be interpreted as his filiopietist devotion to the memory of his dominant father, and Alfred Marshall’s trivialization of Austrian insights into his own neo-Ricardian schema also came from a highly moralistic and evangelical neo-Calvinist.
Conversely, it is no accident that the Austrian School, the major challenge to the Smith-Ricardo vision, arose in a country that was not only solidly Catholic, but whose values and attitudes were still heavily influenced by Aristotelian and Thomist thought. The German precursors of the Austrian School flourished, not in Protestant and anti-Catholic Prussia, but in those German states that were either Catholic or were politically allied to Austria rather than Prussia.
The result of these researches was my growing conviction that leaving out religious outlook, as well as social and political philosophy, would disastrously skew any picture of the history of economic thought. This is fairly obvious for the centuries before the nineteenth, but it is true for that century as well, even as the technical apparatus takes on more of a life of its own.
In consequence of these insights, these volumes are very different from the norm, and not just in presenting an Austrian rather than a neoclassical or institutionalist perspective.
The entire work is much longer than most since it insists on bringing in all the “lesser” figures and their interactions as well as emphasizing the importance of their religious and social philosophies as well as their narrower, strictly “economic” views. But I would hope that the length and inclusion of other elements does not make this work less readable. On the contrary, history necessarily means narrative, discussion of real persons as well as their abstract theories, and includes triumphs, tragedies, and conflicts, conflicts which are often moral as well as purely theoretical. Hence, I hope that, for the reader, the unwonted length will be offset by the inclusion of far more human drama than is usually offered in histories of economic thought.
Notes
[1] Joseph Schumpeter’s valuable and monumental History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954) has sometimes been referred to as “Austrian.” But while Schumpeter was raised in Austria and studied under the great Austrian Böhm-Bawerk, he himself was a dedicated Walrasian, and his History was, in addition, eclectic and idiosyncratic.
[2] For an explanation of the three leading Austrian paradigms at the present time, see Murray N. Rothbard, The Present State of Austrian Economics (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1992).
[3] When the present author was preparing for his doctoral orals at Columbia University, he had the venerable John Maurice Clark as examiner in the history of economic thought. When he asked Clark whether he should read Jevons, Clark replied, in some surprise: “What’s the point? The good in Jevons is all in Marshall.”
[4] Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (5 vols., New York: Viking Press, 1946-59); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
[5] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
[6] The attention devoted in recent years to a brilliant critique of neoclassical formalism as totally dependent on obsolete mid-nineteenth-century mechanics is a welcome sign of this recent change of attitude. See Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[7] At the present time, when English has become the European lingua franca, and most European journals publish articles in English, this bother has been minimized.
This is the introduction to his last great work, The History of Economic Thought: An Austrian Perspective, available now for $45 for the two volume set. …”
An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought
“…An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought is a work of economic history written by Murray N. Rothbard. Rothbard notes in the introduction that the book was originally conceived as a “standard Adam Smith-to-the-present moderately sized book”; however, in the process of writing it, Rothbard expanded the project into a multi-volume series, and expanded the scope of the project to include economists who preceded Smith. Only the first two volumes, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith and Classical Economics, were completed before Rothbard’s death in 1995. …”
“Let us also keep in mind that a demand for better answers is not a partisan exercise. As we have seen, most Republicans are broadly Keynesians, as are most Democrats, as are most parties throughout the world. This is what “everyone” has been taught. We are all thus caught up together in a circular argument(that Keynesianism is right because most people assume it is right). If we want to save our children from more failed experiments, we will need to embrace change, real change, not the “change” promised by President Obama and other political leaders that just takes us back to the 1930s.”
~Hunter Lewis
“Keynes did not add any new idea to the body of inflationist fallacies, a thousand times refuted by economists…
He merely knew how to cloak the plea for inflation and credit expansion in the sophisticated terminology of mathematical economics.”
~Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, pages 787 and 793
“…Synopsis
In responding to the financial crash of 2008, both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration have relied on prescriptions developed by John Maynard Keynes, the most important economist since Marx. But should we be relying on Keynes? What did Keynes actually say? Did he make his case? Hunter Lewis concludes that he did not. If Keynes was wrong then so are the economic policies of virtually all world governments today.
Best Books Criticizing Keynesian Economics | David Gordon
Keynesian Predictions vs. American History | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Keynesian Economics vs. Austrian Economics
Ron Paul – Discussing Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics
Prepare for the Worst | Ron Paul
Bank Failures in a Keynesian World | Douglas E. French
Ron Paul: Keynesianism Delivers a Decade of Zero
Revisiting the Economics of John Maynard Keynes | PBS NewsHour
Fear the Boom and Bust” a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem
Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society
“Let us hope that we do not have to wait too long for Keynes to join Mao and Marx and other faded and false utopian. To turn away from false utopias does not mean giving up on entirely attainable ends and ideals. We can have a stable economy, one built on truthful prices and profits. That economy can be sustainable both financially and environmentally, and it can, with work and persistence, finally put human poverty behind us.”
~Hunter Lewis
“In old fashioned language, Keynes proposed cheating the workers.”
~Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy, page 70
For the last seventy-four years college students, both undergraduate and graduate, were taught Keynesian economics in their Macroeconomics courses. I was one of them.
The works of von Mises, Hayek, and Hazlitt were never mentioned.
Many professors, even today, do not know who they were.
Times are a changing.
Unfortunately the Keynesian cult is alive and well in the economics profession and in the White House.
One only wonders why any one would still take Keynes or Keynesian economists seriously.
Yet they do.
Apparently ideology trumps logical thinking, knowledge of economic history, the history of economic thought and common sense.
Hunter Lewis dedicated his book to Henry Hazlitt and recommended especially his books, The Failure of the “New Economics” and Economics in One Lesson.
I could not agree more with his recommendations.
“The art of economics consists of looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
~Harry Hazlitt
“Henry Hazlitt did the seemingly impossible, something that was and is a magnificent service to all people everywhere. He wrote a line-by-line commentary and refutation of one of the most destructive, fallacious, and convoluted books of the century. The target here is John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory, the book that appeared in 1936 and swept all before it.
In economic science, Keynes changed everything. He supposedly demonstrated that prices don’t work, that private investment is unstable, that sound money is intolerable, and that government was needed to shore up the system and save it. It was simply astonishing how economists the world over put up with this, but it happened. He converted a whole generation in the late period of the Great Depression. By the 1950s, almost everyone was Keynesian.
But Hazlitt, the nation’s economics teacher, would have none of it. And he did the hard work of actually going through the book to evaluate its logic according to Austrian-style logical reasoning. The result: a 500-page masterpiece of exposition.
Murray Rothbard was blown away.
Keynes’ General Theory is here riddled chapter by chapter, line by line, with due account taken of the latest theoretical developments. The complete refutation of a vast network of fallacy can only be accomplished by someone thoroughly grounded in a sound positive theory. Henry Hazlitt has that groundwork.An “Austrian” follower of Ludwig von Mises, he is uniquely qualified for this task, and performs it surpassingly well. It is no exaggeration to say that this is by far the best book on economics published since Mises’ great Human Action in 1949. Mises’ work set forth the completed structure of the modern “Austrian” theory. Hazlitt’s fine critique of Keynes, based on these principles, is a worthy complement to Human Action.
Henry Hazlitt, a renowned economic journalist, is a better economist than a whole host of sterile academicians, and, in contrast to many of them, he is distinguished by courage: the courage to remain am “Austrian” in the teeth of the Keynesian holocaust, alongside Mises and F. A. Hayek. On its merits, this book should conquer the economics profession as rapidly as did Keynes.
But whether the currently fashionable economists read and digest this book or not is, in the long run, immaterial; it will be read, and it will destroy the Keynesian System. At the very least, there is now a new generation under thirty-five, to bring this message to fruition.
Far from being a dull read, this book has all the brightness and clarity we’ve come to expect from Hazlitt. He is a dazzling writer, and one can’t be thrill to see him in the ring with the giant Keynes. By the time he delivers the knock-out punch–taking on Keynes’s suggestion that we nationalize investment–there is nothing left of his opponent.
An Ideal Guide to Keynes’s Dangerous and Destructive Economics
by David Gordon
“…Lewis has exposed with unmatched clarity the lineaments of Keynes’s system and enabled us to see exactly its disabling defects. Keynes defied common sense, unable to sustain the brilliant paradoxes that his fertile intellect constantly devised. Lewis’s book is an ideal guide to Keynes’s dangerous and destructive economics.”
“…While at Newsweek, Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, which has sold nearly one million copies and is available in at least ten languages. Hazlitt argued that government intervention focuses on the consequences that are seen and ignores those that are not. The latter include wealth not created and even destroyed by regulation, inflation, and taxation. In 1947, he wrote Will Dollars Save the World?, a book attacking the Marshall Plan, which he saw as an international welfare scheme. The subsequent history of U.S. foreign aid shows just how right he was.
In 1950, Hazlitt became editor, along with John Chamberlain, of the fortnightly magazine, the Freeman; some of his best articles published there were later collected into The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt. Also as a prophet, Hazlitt wrote The Great Idea (reprinted a year later as Time Will Run Back), a novel showing how a country can move from socialism to market economics at a time when most people thought socialism was the unstoppable wave of the future.
In 1959, Hazlitt came out with The Failure of the “New Economics,” an extraordinary line-by-line refutation of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. And though it was panned by the American academic journals at the time, it enlivened a growing movement favoring free markets over state planning and continues to be an essential resource. A year later, Hazlitt collected a series of scholarly attacks on Keynes as The Critics of Keynesian Economics, still in print today. …”
“…Henry Hazlitt confronted the rise of Keynesianism in his day and put together an intellectual arsenal: the most brilliant economists of the time showing what is wrong with the system, in great detail with great rigor. With excerpts from books and articles published between the 30s and 50s, it remains the most powerful anti-Keynesian collection ever assembled.
· Introduction By Henry Hazlitt
· Say’s Law By Jean Baptiste Say
· Of The Influence Of Consumption On Production By John Stuart Mill
· Mr. Keynes On The Causes Of Unemployment By Jacob Viner
· Unemployment: And Mr. Keynes’s Revolution In Economic Theory By Frank H. Knight
· Mr. Keynes’ “General Theory” By Etienne Mantoux
· The Economics Of Abundance By F. A. Hayek
· Liquidity Preference And The Theory Of Interest And Money By Franco Modigliani
· Digression On Keynes by Benjamin M. Anderson
· The Philosophy Of Lord Keynes By Philip Cortney
· Beveridge’s “Full Employment In A Free Society” By R. Gordon Wasson
· John Maynard Keynes By Garet Garrett
· The Fallacies Of Lord Keynes’ General Theory By Jacques Rueff
· Appraisal Of Keynesian Economics By John H. Williams
· Continental European Pre-Keynesianism By L. Albert Hahn
· Stones Into Bread, The Keynesian Miracle By Ludwig Von Mises
· Lord Keynes And Say’s Law By Ludwig Von Mises
· Lord Keynes And The Financial Community By Joseph Stagg Lawrence
· The Economics Of Full Employment By Wilhelm Ropke
· The Significance Of Price Flexibility By W. H. Hutt
· Keynes’ Theory Of Underemployment Equilibrium By Arthur F. Burns
· The Keynesian Mythology By Melchior Palyi
Mr. Keynes And The “Day Of Judgment” By David Mc Cord Wright
The Making of the Keynes-Hayek Rap: Economic Theory Meets Popular Culture
Hayek on Keynes (1977)
Hayek on Keynes
Keynes and His Influence | Gary North
Keynes the Man: Hero or Villain? [Murray N. Rothbard]
Murray Rothbard Where Did The Free Markets Go?
Keynesian Economics: The Beast That Won’t Die | Peter G. Klein
Keynes and the “New Economics” of Fascism | by Joseph T. Salerno [Lecture 6 of 10]
Socialism and Fascism
John Taylor’s Reason Versus Paul Krugman’s Hyperbole (Part 1 of 2)
John Taylor’s Reason Versus Paul Krugman’s Hyperbole (Part 2 of 2)
The Failure of the “New Economics” (Chapter 29) by Henry Hazlitt
Turning Japanese – Is the US Creating Its Own Lost Decade?
TAKE IT TO THE LIMITS: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism
Hunter Lewis
“…Hunter Lewis was born in Dayton, Ohio, USA, in 1947 and graduated from the Groton School and Harvard University (AB 1969). After working at the Boston Company, then one of the largest investment managers, first as assistant to the president and then vice-president, in 1975 Lewis co-founded and served as co-chief executive and then chief executive of Cambridge Associates LLC[1], an investment advisor to research universities and colleges representing over three-quarters of U.S. higher education endowment assets, foundations, cultural organizations, international organizations and other non-profit institutions as well as families. Lewis was a co-inventor of what became known as the American University style of institutional investing[2], which gave American university endowment funds the highest investment returns in the world among institutional investors[3], and which became widely emulated.
In addition to his work at Cambridge Associates, Lewis has served as treasurer and president of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a graduate research institute affiliated with 150 American colleges and universities[4], president of the Alliance for Natural Health-USA[5], chairman of the National Environmental Trust[6], chairman of Dumbarton Oaks (affiliate of Harvard University)[6], founder and chairman of the Trearne Foundation, which provides educational assistance to foster children[7], chairman of the Worldwatch Institute[6], chairman of Shelburne Farms[8], treasurer of the World Wildlife Fund (World Wide Fund for Nature), trustee of World Wildlife Fund International[9], member of the Advisory Board of Environmental Health Sciences, trustee of the Morgan Library[6], trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund[6], trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello)[6], trustee of the Peabody School[6], trustee of the Groton School[6], trustee of the Core Knowledge Foundation[10], and member of the World Bank Pension Finance Committee[6].
Lewis has contributed to many newspapers and periodicals including the New York Times, The Times,[11] the Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly as well as numerous websites such as Forbes.com. He also is an author and editor of books on economics and moral philosophy. His works include: Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts[12] (Axios Press; September 25, 2009), Are the Rich Necessary?: Great Economic Arguments and How They Reflect Our Personal Values[13] (Axios Press; September 25, 2007; Rev Updated PB edition October 30, 2009), A Question of Values : Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives (Harper, Collins; 1990, Axios Press; Rev Updated edition May 25, 2000), The Beguiling Serpent (Axios Press; August 31, 2000), Alternative Values: For and Against Wealth, Power, Fame, Praise, Glory, and Physical Pleasure (Axios Press; July 25, 2005) and The Real World War (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan/Putnam; 1982).
“Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom. “
~Friedrich August von Hayek
Glenn Beck-06/08/10-A
Glenn Beck-06/08/10-B
Glenn Beck-06/08/10-C
Glenn Beck-06/08/10-D
Hayek on Moral Values & Altruism
Glenn Beck really surprised me with this show on Hayek and his book the Road To Serfdom and Thomas E. Woods as a guest.
I had just finished a post on a Tom Wood’s entitlements speech.
As a classical liberal I am a great admirer of both Friedrich A. Hayek and his teacher Ludwig von Mises.
Glenn, time for a show on Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.
Tom Woods, Robert Higgs, Robert P. Murphy, and Lew Rockwell would be excellent guests on the ideas of these late great economists.
Economics and Moral Courage | Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Meltdown | Thomas E Woods, Jr.
America’s New Road to Serfdom and the Continuing Relevance of Austrian Economics [Richard Ebeling]
Skip the first 12 minutes of introductions
The Complex Path of Ideological Change (Part 1 of 7)
Unemployment: The 1930s and Today | Robert P. Murphy
The Future of Austrian Economics | Murray N. Rothbard
“There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.”
“…The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich von Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974) which transformed the landscape of political thought in the 20th century, shifting the terms of debate for millions of people across the political spectrum.[1][2]The Road to Serfdom is among the most influential and popular expositions of classical liberalism and libertarianism.
The title refers to economic and political policies which the author believes to invariably lead to the socio-economic condition known as “serfdom.”
The book was originally published by Routledge Press in March 1944 in the UK and then by the University of Chicago Press in September 1944. A condensed version of the book written by Max Eastman was then published as the lead article in the April issue of Reader’s Digest, with a press run of several million copies. This condensed version was then offered as a Book of the Month selection with a press run of over 600,000 copies. In February 1945 a picture-book version was published in Look magazine, later made into a pamphlet and distributed by General Motors. The book has been translated into approximately 20 languages and is dedicated to “The socialists of all parties.” The introduction to the 50th anniversary edition is written by Milton Friedman (another recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics 1976). In 2007, the University of Chicago Press put out a “Definitive Edition.” In total the book has sold over two million copies.[3] …”
“…
Libertarian critics
Libertarian economist Walter Block has observed critically that while the The Road to Serfdom makes a strong case against centrally-planned economies, it appears only lukewarm in its support of a free market system and laissez-faire capitalism, with Hayek even going so far as to say that “probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire capitalism.” In the book, Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system (a view that he later withdrew[19]), work-hours regulation, social welfare, and institutions for the flow of proper information. Through analysis of this and many other of Hayek’s works, Block asserts that: “in making the case against socialism, Hayek was led into making all sort of compromises with what otherwise appeared to be his own philosophical perspective—so much so, that if a system was erected on the basis of them, it would not differ too sharply from what this author explicitly opposed.”[20]
Gordon Tullock has argued Hayek’s analysis predicted totalitarian governments in much of Europe in the late 20th century. He uses Sweden, in which the government at that time controlled 63 percent of GNP, as an example to support his argument that the basic problem with The Road to Serfdom is “that it offered predictions which turned out to be false. The steady advance of government in places such as Sweden has not led to any loss of non-economic freedoms.” While criticizing Hayek, Tullock still praises the classical liberal notion of economic freedom, saying, “Arguments for political freedom are strong, as are the arguments for economic freedom. We needn’t make one set of arguments depend on the other.”[21] However, according to Robert Skidelsky, Hayek “safeguarded himself from such retrospective refutation.” Skidelsky argues that Hayek’s argument was contingent, and that, “By the 1970s there was some evidence of the slippery slope…and then there was Thatcher. Hayek’s warning played a critical part in her determination to ‘roll back the state.'”[22] …”
The Truth About the Great Depression (by Thomas DiLorenzo)
Robert Higgs on Hoover’s Great Depression Policies ?
The Great Depression and the Current Recession (Robert Higgs)
“Robert Higgs is an American economist of the Austrian School and a libertarian anarchist. He currently serves as a Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and is an adjunct faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, and the University of Economics, Prague. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow for the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation. Mr. Higgs is also a regular contributor to LewRockwell.com.
His writings in economics and economic history have most often focused on the causes, means, and effects of government growth. Some of the books he has authored include, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government; Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11, and Depression, War and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy. He is also the editor of the collections, Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy; The Challenge of Liberty: Classical Liberalism Today; and Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism.”
80 Years Later: Parallels Between 1929 and 2009
A Recipe for the Next Great Depression
Keynesian Economics Is Wrong: Bigger Gov’t Is Not Stimulus
Obama’s So-Called Stimulus: Good For Government, Bad For the Economy
Ron Paul: Obama Stimulus Package Will Turn Recession Into Depression
UCLA’s Lee Ohanian: Hoover, Roosevelt and the Great Depression
Robert Higgs on Economic Prospects for 2010
Background Articles and Videos
Higgs and Liebowitz on Causes of the Economic Crisis ?
There have always been conservative and libertarian or classical liberals students and professors at most colleges in the United States including New York University and the University of California at Berkeley.
A new and viable third party will emerge that challenges the progressive radical socialists in both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties will attempt to bar this party from coming to power.
While it will take many years if not decades for this new third party to win, the college students of today will be the future leaders of this party.
“…Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was the dean of the Austrian School of economics, the founder of libertarianism, and an exemplar of the Old Right. The author of thousands of articles and 25 books, he was also Lew Rockwell’s great teacher and mentor. LewRockwell.com is dedicated to Murray’s memory, and seeks to follow his fearless example. …”
“…Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American intellectual, individualist anarchist,[1] author, and economist of the Austrian School who helped define modern libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed “anarcho-capitalism”.[2][3] Rothbard wrote over twenty books.
Building on the Austrian School’s concept of spontaneous order in markets, support for a free market in money production and condemnation of central planning,[4] Rothbard sought to minimize coercive government control of the economy. He considered the monopoly force of government the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term wellbeing of the populace, labeling the State as nothing but a “gang of thieves writ large” – the locus of the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.[5][6][7][8]
Rothbard concluded that virtually all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. He viewed many regulations and laws ostensibly promulgated for the “public interest” as self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats engaging in dangerously unfettered self-aggrandizement, as they were not subject to market disciplines which would quickly eliminate such parasitic inefficiencies if they were to occur in the competitive private sector.[9][10][11]
Rothbard was equally condemning of state corporatism. He criticized many instances where business elites co-opted government’s monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy in a manner benefiting them at the expense of their competitive rivals.[12]
He argued that taxation represents coercive theft on a grand scale, and “a compulsory monopoly of force” prohibiting the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers.[6][13] He also considered central banking and fractional reserve banking under a monopoly fiat money system a form of state-sponsored, legalized financial fraud, antithetical to libertarian principles and ethics.[14][15][16][17] Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.[18][19]
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Story 1: Donald Trump is a Libertarian-Leaning Conservative and Ted Cruz is Hard Core Conservative — Trump/Cruz Ticket? — Conservatives Intellectuals Need To Focus on Results Not Words — The Republican Party Is Not A Conservative Party — Conservatives and Libertarians Voters Have Been Abandoning Both The Democratic and Republican Parties Who Are Bought and Paid For By The Donor Base — The Tyranny of Two Party System — Corrupt Big Government Parties — The Decline and Fall of American Republic — Remembering 9/11 — Videos
History Documentary – World Trade Center attacks, Rise and Fall of the twin towers
911 Jumpers 9/11 in 18 min Plane Crashes Top World Trade Center Towers September 11 Terror Fact Vid
Russell Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles
The Republican Party Has Ceased To be Conservative
Mark Levin • John Boehner’s GOP is NOT a Conservative Party • Hannity • 1/7/15 •
Liberal Party: 10 Reasons You Might Be A Liberal – Learn Liberty
Libertarianism: An Introduction
Murray Rothbard: Six Stages of the Libertarian Movement
Libertarianism | Murray N. Rothbard
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Donald Trump vs. Fox News | Republican Presidential Debate Analysis!
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tube.com/watch?v=Uj9qvBwOeMA]
Conservative Review
State Name Party Score Years in DC Next Election Track State Name Party Score Years in DC Next Election Track
Conservatives and Libertarians
(A-C)
UT
Sen. Mike Lee R A 100% 4 2016
TX
Sen. Ted Cruz R A 96% 2 2018
KY
Sen. Rand Paul R A 93% 4 2016
SC
Sen. Tim Scott R B 85% 4 2016
NE
Sen. Benjamin Sasse R B 80% 0 2020
GA
Sen. David Perdue R B 80% 0 2020
AL
Sen. Jeff Sessions R B 80% 18 2020
FL
Sen. Marco Rubio R B 80% 4 2016
ID
Sen. Jim Risch R C 78% 6 2020
OK
Sen. Jim Inhofe R C 77% 28 2020
ID
Sen. Michael Crapo R C 76% 22 2016
IA
Sen. Charles Grassley R C 72% 40 2016
LA
Sen. David Vitter R C 71% 16 2016
Moderates and Progressives
(D-F)
WI
Sen. Ron Johnson R D 67% 4 2016
AL
Sen. Richard Shelby R D 66% 36 2016
WY
Sen. Michael Enzi R D 64% 18 2020
PA
Sen. Pat Toomey R D 63% 10 2016
KS
Sen. Jerry Moran R D 62% 18 2016
WY
Sen. John Barrasso R D 61% 8 2018
LA
Sen. Bill Cassidy R D 60% 6 2020
AK
Sen. Dan Sullivan R D 60% 0 2020
OK
Sen. James Lankford R D 60% 4 2016
IA
Sen. Joni Ernst R D 60% 0 2020
MT
Sen. Steve Daines R D 60% 2 2020
AR
Sen. Tom Cotton R D 60% 2 2020
TX
Sen. John Cornyn R F 59% 13 2020
NE
Sen. Deb Fischer R F 56% 2 2018
KS
Sen. Pat Roberts R F 55% 34 2020
OH
Sen. Rob Portman R F 54% 16 2016
NV
Sen. Dean Heller R F 52% 8 2018
SD
Sen. John Thune R F 52% 16 2016
KY
Sen. Mitch McConnell R F 52% 30 2020
UT
Sen. Orrin Hatch R F 52% 38 2018
TN
Sen. Bob Corker R F 51% 8 2018
AR
Sen. John Boozman R F 50% 14 2016
NC
Sen. Richard Burr R F 49% 20 2016
IN
Sen. Daniel Coats R F 48% 22 2016
SC
Sen. Lindsey Graham R F 47% 20 2020
AZ
Sen. John McCain R F 43% 32 2016
NH
Sen. Kelly Ayotte R F 41% 4 2016
GA
Sen. Johnny Isakson R F 40% 16 2016
NC
Sen. Thom Tillis R F 40% 0 2020
AZ
Sen. Jeff Flake R F 38% 14 2018
MO
Sen. Roy Blunt R F 38% 18 2016
MS
Sen. Thad Cochran R F 33% 41 2020
MS
Sen. Roger Wicker R F 30% 19 2018
IL
Sen. Mark Kirk R F 28% 14 2016
ND
Sen. John Hoeven R F 26% 4 2016
TN
Sen. Lamar Alexander R F 24% 12 2020
CO
Sen. Cory Gardner R F 20% 4 2020
AK
Sen. Lisa Murkowski R F 20% 12 2016
SD
Sen. Mike Rounds R F 20% 0 2020
WV
Sen. Shelley Capito R F 20% 14 2020
ME
Sen. Susan Collins R F 16% 18 2020 –
https://www.conservativereview.com/scorecard#sthash.9HLKmHG5.dpuf
– See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/scorecard#sthash.7BNr4KT7.dpuf
Party Affiliation
NATIONAL REVIEW’S JONAH GOLDBERG: ‘COUNT ME OUT’ OF ANY CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT WITH DONALD TRUMP
By BEN SHAPIRO
On Saturday, National Review senior editor Jonah Goldbergpenned a controversial column in which he rejected Donald Trump and his followers from the conservative movement. “Well, if this is the conservative movement now, I guess you’re going to have to count me out,” Goldberg writes.
Goldberg goes on to suggest that the embrace of Trump perverts conservatism itself, broadening the definition of the movement in order to include Trump.
Goldberg, whom I consider a friend and a brilliant commentator, is right to label Trump insufficiently conservative. I have specifically argued that Trump ought not be the nominee thanks to his insufficient conservatism—so has Michelle Malkin, so have numerous other conservative commentators.
But here is the sad truth: Many of the same people appalled by Trump made Trump’s candidacy possible.
Trump is a product of a conservatism-less Republicanism, prepared for and championed by the intellectual elites who told us to ignore Mitt Romney’s creation of Romneycare and
Over at National Review, even as Goldberg condemns Trump for his non-conservatism, another columnist simultaneously urges a ticket with Governor “God Told Me To Use Obamacare Money To Expand Medicaid” John Kasich (R-OH) and Sen. Marco “Immigration Gang of Eight” Rubio (R-FL). Goldberg himself championed Romney’s candidacy because he wasn’t a conservative, writing back in 2012:
Why wouldn’t the same logic apply to Trump?
And while Goldberg today raps Trump on the knuckles for his support of socialized medicine, going so far as to label opposition to such policy a “core tenet of American conservatism from Day One,” Goldberg used Romneycare as a point in favor of Romney in 2012: “He is a man of duty and purpose. He was told to ‘fix’ health care in ways Massachusetts would like… He did it all. The man does his assignments.”
Goldberg today says that Trump doesn’t deserve to be a part of the conservative movement, and his followers have excised themselves from the conservative community. But in 2012, he warned that anyone saying the same of Mitt Romney threatened the possibility of conservative victory. In 2012, Goldberg explicitly opposed purges and purity tests:
What requirements did Mitt Romney, and John Kasich, and John McCain, and Mitch McConnell fulfill that Trump does not? Goldberg is right that Trump has “no ideological guardrails whatsoever” when it comes to taxes and “knows less than most halfway-decent DC interns about foreign policy.” Goldberg could have added that Trump has made an enormous amount of money utilizing eminent domain, that he supports affirmative action, and that he opposes free trade, among other pernicious positions. There is a reason that this weekend full-fledged economic idiot Paul Krugman endorsed Trump’s economic policies.
The question is: Why are so many Republicans backing him? There are two answers: first, he’s tough on illegal immigration, the only issue many conservatives believe matters. The second answer is more telling, however: Trump has heavy support because Republicans rejected ideological purity a long time ago. And here’s the irony: Goldberg and others can’t call Tea Partiers to Jesus on Trump because, according to polls, Tea Partiers don’t support Trump in outsized numbers. The reality is that the same people who don’t like ideological litmus tests support Trump. Just a few weeks back, the Washington Post concluded that Trump’s fans “are more moderate than Tea Partiers were,” significantly more likely to call themselves Republicans than Tea Partiers were, far younger and less religious and blue collar than Tea Partiers.
As Sallah from Raiders of the Lost Ark would put it, “Jonah, you’re digging in the wrong place.”
If you want to target Trump supporters for failing to take conservatism seriously, try starting with those who don’t take conservatism seriously. Most of them were trained in the acceptability of “victory before conservatism” Republicanism by the some of the same folks now deriding the poll-leading Trump.
I’ve lived this story before: I’m from California. Trump is Arnold Schwarzenegger without the Austrian accent. He’s a know-nothing with a huge name and a Teflon personality, and people get behind him because he’s a celebrity and because victory matters more than principle. I know that’s so, because I made the same mistake with regard to Schwarzenegger, explicitly endorsing him in spite of his insufficient conservatism on the grounds that voters in California would get used to voting Republican.
That was a failure. Schwarzenegger was terrible, and what followed him was a shift to radical leftism unthinkable in the early days of his candidacy. I learned that lesson, and in January 2012, I said that the conservative embrace of Mitt Romney would pervert the movement itself, in the same way Goldberg now accuses Trump of perverting conservatism:
Like Goldberg, I fear the same from Trump: I fear that he’ll be a wild card with no governing principle, that even if he were to win, he’d irrevocably split conservatism. But I also recognize that Trump isn’t a departure for Republicans abandoning principle: he’s the political love child of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, a combination of the non-conservative “victory mentality” and the arrogance of a dictatorial left many conservatives want to see countered with fire.
In sum, I’m happy to welcome establishment Republicans who want to revivify conservative litmus tests to the party. But from now on, let’s be consistent: if we’re going to oust Trump based on his ideology, those requirements can’t be waived for others.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/09/07/national-reviews-jonah-goldberg-count-me-out-of-any-conservative-movement-with-donald-trump/
The Words Trump Doesn’t Use
by JIM GERAGHTY
Did you ever think you would see the day when the GOP front-runner rarely uttered the words “freedom” and “liberty”? Perhaps some Republicans can be accused of loving liberty and freedom too much — or at least using those words as rhetorical crutches. Donald Trump is not one of them. The current GOP presidential front-runner rarely uses the words “freedom” or “liberty” in his remarks at all.
Trump didn’t use the words “freedom” or “liberty” in his announcement speech. He didn’t use those words in his Nashville speech on August 29, or his Nashville rally on August 21, or his appearance at the Iowa State Fair on August 15, or his rally and news conference in New Hampshire on August 14, or his news conference in Birch Run, Mich., or his press conference in Laredo, Texas, on July 23.
He didn’t use those words while discussing his signing of the Republican National Committee’s pledge last Thursday, or in his contentious interview with Hugh Hewitt the same day.
Trump did use the term “free-market” once during his Meet the Press interview with Chuck Todd, in a defense of his qualified support for affirmative action: “Well, you know, you have to also go free market. You have to go capability. You have to do a lot of things. But I’m fine with affirmative action.” The word “liberty” didn’t even come up.
This is an unusual vocabulary for a Republican front-runner. It wasn’t that long ago that grass-roots conservatives showed up at Tea Party rallies with signs reading, “Liberty: All the Stimulus We Need.” The Tea Party named itself after an event organized by the Sons of Liberty. The GOP platform declares the party was “born in opposition to the denial of liberty.”
Trump’s lexicon is another indicator of the dramatic shift he would represent in moving the Republican party from a libertarian-leaning one to a populist one. During the Obama era, self-identified libertarians have asked whether the Tea Party and the GOP are truly dedicated to liberty and individual rights, or if their real objection to big government is that it’s controlled by Democrats. The embrace of Trump suggests their skepticism was well-founded.
It’s no accident that Trump has been labeled a populist by outlets across the political spectrum, from The American Interest to NPR. His speeches and off-the-cuff remarks make clear that he doesn’t see the world through the lens of free and unfree; he sees it through the lens of strength and weakness: For me, conservatism as it pertains to our country is fiscal. We have to be strong and secure and get rid of our debt. The military has to be powerful and not necessarily used but very powerful. I am on the sort of a little bit social side of conservative when it comes — I want people to be taken care of from a health-care standpoint. But to do that, we have to be strong. I want to save Social Security without cuts. I want a strong country. And to me, conservative means a strong country with very little debt.
The man whose slogan is “Make America Great Again” doesn’t seem particularly worried about a Leviathan state infringing upon its citizens’ liberties. He sees a disordered society whose people are threatened by violent criminals coming across the border, undermined by poor negotiation in foreign-trade and security agreements, and asked by free-riding allies to shoulder way too much of the burden in a dangerous world.
That philosophy is dramatically different from the liberty-focused message Republicans have become accustomed to since the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. And, at least for now, it has made Trump the front-runner by a wide margin.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423819/donald-trump-speeches-no-liberty-freedom?target=author&tid=814
(Click here for VoteMatch quiz)
(Click on question for explanation and background)
(Click on topic for excerpt & citation)
Abortion is a woman’s unrestricted right
(-3 points on Social scale)
Stress importance of a strong family, & a culture of Life: Opposes topic 1
I am now pro-life; after years of being pro-choice: Strongly Opposes topic 1
I changed my views to pro-life based on personal stories: Opposes topic 1
I am pro-life; fight ObamaCare abortion funding: Opposes topic 1
Pro-choice, but ban partial birth abortion: Favors topic 1
Favors abortion rights but respects opposition: Favors topic 1
Legally require hiring women & minorities
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Bad students (like Obama) shouldn’t go to Harvard: Opposes topic 2
Comfortable with same-sex marriage
(-3 points on Social scale)
No gay marriage; no same-sex partner benefits: Strongly Opposes topic 3
Tolerate diversity; prosecute hate crimes against gays: Favors topic 3
Keep God in the public sphere
(-5 points on Social scale)
End “creative spelling,” “estimating,” & “empowerment”: Favors topic 4
Let “saints” help teen moms; restrict public assistance: Strongly Favors topic 4
Expand ObamaCare
(+2 points on Economic scale)
Don’t cut Medicare; grow the economy to keep benefits: Favors topic 5
ObamaCare deductibles are so high that it’s useless: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Save Medicare & Medicaid without cutting them to the bone: Favors topic 5
Kill ObamaCare before it becomes a trillion-ton weight: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Increase insurance competition across state lines: Strongly Opposes topic 5
We must have universal health care: Strongly Favors topic 5
Privatize Social Security
(+2 points on Economic scale)
Social Security isn’t an “entitlement”; it’s honoring a deal: Opposes topic 6
Pay off debt; put $3T interest savings into Trust Fund: Opposes topic 6
Let people invest their own retirement funds: Strongly Favors topic 6
No government investment of retirement funds: Strongly Favors topic 6
Vouchers for school choice
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Opposes Common Core: Favors topic 7
Bring on the competition; tear down the union walls: Favors topic 7
School choice will improve public schools: Strongly Favors topic 7
EPA regulations are too restrictive
(-3 points on Social scale)
Stricter punishment reduces crime
(-5 points on Social scale)
Death penalty deters like violent TV leads kids astray: Favors topic 9
Hold judges accountable; don’t reduce sentences: Favors topic 9
For tough anti-crime policies; not criminals’ rights: Favors topic 9
Absolute right to gun ownership
(+2 points on Economic scale)
I am against gun control: Strongly Favors topic 10
Dems and Reps are both wrong on guns: Neutral on topic 10
For assault weapon ban, waiting period, & background check: Opposes topic 10
Higher taxes on the wealthy
(-3 points on Economic scale)
Raising business tax causes businesses to move jobs overseas: Strongly Opposes topic 11
4 brackets; 1-5-10-15%; kill death tax & corporate tax: Strongly Opposes topic 11
Repeal the inheritance tax to offset one-time wealth tax: Opposes topic 11
Simplify tax code; end marriage penalty & other hidden taxes: Opposes topic 11
Opposes flat tax; benefits wealthy too much: Strongly Favors topic 11
Personally avoids sales tax, but knows many people like it: Opposes topic 11
One-time 14.25% tax on wealth, to erase national debt: Strongly Favors topic 11
Predicts 35% boost to economy from eliminating national debt: Favors topic 11
Tax assets over $10 million, paid over 10 years: Strongly Favors topic 11
Pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens
(-5 points on Social scale)
We need strong borders; we need a wall: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Citizenship for illegal immigrants is a GOP suicide mission: Strongly Opposes topic 12
351,000 illegal aliens are in our prisons; costing $1.1B: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Anchor babies were NEVER the intent of the 14th Amendment: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Invite foreigners graduating from college to stay in US: Favors topic 12
Triple-layered fence & Predator drones on Mexican border: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Control borders; even legal immigration should be difficult: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Limit new immigration; focus on people already here: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Support & expand free trade
(-3 points on Economic scale)
20% tax on all imported goods: Strongly Opposes topic 13
Repatriate jobs that China has been stealing: Opposes topic 13
Embrace globalization and international markets: Strongly Favors topic 13
Renegotiate tougher & fairer trade agreements: Opposes topic 13
President should be nation’s trade representative: Favors topic 13
World views US trade officials as ‘saps’: Opposes topic 13
Foreign companies are taking jobs from US: Strongly Opposes topic 13
Support American Exceptionalism
(+5 points on Economic scale)
American interests come first; no apologies: Strongly Favors topic 14
Use force to stop North Korean nuke development: Strongly Favors topic 14
Expand the military
(-5 points on Social scale)
All freedoms flow from national security: Strongly Favors topic 15
3% of GNP for military is too low: Strongly Favors topic 15
Make voter registration easier
(0 points on Social scale)
Avoid foreign entanglements
(+2 points on Social scale)
I said “don’t hit Iraq,” because it destabilized Middle East: Strongly Favors topic 17
Hit ISIS hard and fast: Strongly Opposes topic 17
Defeat ISIS and stop Islamic terrorists: Opposes topic 17
Take $1.5T in oil from Iraq to pay for US victims: Strongly Opposes topic 17
Iraq should pick up the tab for their own liberation: Strongly Opposes topic 17
Criticized Buchanan’s view on Hitler as appeasement: Favors topic 17
Post-Cold War: switch from chess player to dealmaker: Strongly Favors topic 17
Support Russia, but with strings attached: Favors topic 17
Support Israel, our unsinkable Mideast aircraft carrier: Strongly Favors topic 17
No humanitarian intervention; only to direct threats: Opposes topic 17
Prioritize green energy
(+5 points on Economic scale)
No Cap-and-Tax: oil is this country’s lifeblood: Strongly Opposes topic 18
It’s incredible how slowly we’re drilling for oil: Strongly Opposes topic 18
Marijuana is a gateway drug
(0 points on Social scale)
Never drinks, smokes, nor does drugs: Favors topic 19
Fired Miss USA crown winner due to drug over-indulgence: Favors topic 19
Stimulus better than market-led recovery
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Cutting tax rates incentivizes a strong national work ethic: Strongly Opposes topic 20
Previously supported wealth tax; now supports Bush tax cuts: Strongly Opposes topic 20
One-time 14.25% tax on wealth, to erase national debt: Favors topic 20
Click here for explanation of political philosophy.
Click here for VoteMatch quiz.
VoteMatch
Candidate’s Political Philosophy
The below is a way of thinking about the candidate’s political philosophy by dividing the candidate’s VoteMatch answers into “social” and “economic” questions. It is only a theory – please take it with a grain of salt!
Social Questions: Liberals and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while conservatives and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictive answers.
Candidate’s Score
The candidate scored the following on the VoteMatch questions:
Where the candidate’s Social score meets the Economic score on the grid below is the candidate’s political philosophy. Based on the above score, the candidate is a Libertarian-Leaning Conservative.
Economic Score
This measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s economic lives. Economic issues include retirement funding, budget allocations, and taxes.
This measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s economic lives. Economic issues include retirement funding, budget allocations, and taxes.
How We Score Candidates
How we determine a candidate’s stance on each VoteMatch question:
Examples
The chart below indicates how four “hard-core” political philosophers would answer the questions. From this example, you can see how the candidate fits in with each philosophy. The candidate’s answers are on the left.
To ensure balance among political viewpoints, we arranged the wording of the questions so that half the time, the answer involving more government is answered by “support”, and half the time by “oppose.” Hence, each of the “hard core” philosophers would choose “support” for 5 of the Social questions and for 5 of the Economic questions.
Many of these statements cross over the line between social issues and economic issues. And many people might answer what we call a “Social” issue based on economic reasoning. But we have tried to arrange a series of questions which separates the way candidates think about government activities in these two broad scales.
Political Map and some content from Advocates for Self-Government.
(Click here for VoteMatch quiz)
(Click on question for explanation and background)
(Click on topic for excerpt & citation)
Abortion is a woman’s unrestricted right
(-5 points on Social scale)
Companies can deny insuring birth control: Opposes topic 1
Protect innocent human life with partial-birth ban: Strongly Opposes topic 1
Opposes public abortion funding: Opposes topic 1
Opposes churches providing birth control: Opposes topic 1
Legally require hiring women & minorities
(0 points on Economic scale)
NO on reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act: Opposes topic 2
Comfortable with same-sex marriage
(-5 points on Social scale)
Zealotry on same-sex marriage leaves out religious liberty: Strongly Opposes topic 3
Most states can ignore Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage: Strongly Opposes topic 3
Opposes the unrelenting assault on traditional marriage: Strongly Opposes topic 3
Overturn Supreme Court with anti-gay marriage Amendment: Strongly Opposes topic 3
Opposes gay pride parades and opposes gay marriage: Strongly Opposes topic 3
One-man-one-woman marriage is building block of society: Strongly Opposes topic 3
Supports defining traditional marriage: Opposes topic 3
Supports banning military gay marriage: Opposes topic 3
Sponsored state definition of marriage supersedes federal gay marriage: Strongly Opposes topic 3
Keep God in the public sphere
(-5 points on Social scale)
Stop IRS from asking: ‘tell me the content of your prayers’: Strongly Favors topic 4
Government checks create dependency: Favors topic 4
Defend Ten Commandments and “under God” in the Pledge: Strongly Favors topic 4
Rated 100% by the AU, indicating opposition to separation of church & state: Strongly Favors topic 4
Expand ObamaCare
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Support nuns’ battle for religious liberty against ObamaCare: Opposes topic 5
To repeal ObamaCare, show Dems they’d lose by supporting it: Opposes topic 5
5 million had health insurance canceled because of ObamaCare: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Vow to repeal ObamaCare: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Save Medicare by raising eligibility age: Favors topic 5
Throw my body in front of a train to stop ObamaCare: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Defeat ObamaCare; rein in the federal government: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Defund, repeal, & replace federal care with free market: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Repeal any federal health care takeover: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Supports repealing ObamaCare: Strongly Opposes topic 5
Supports market-based health insurance: Opposes topic 5
Privatize Social Security
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Transition younger workers into personal savings system: Favors topic 6
Rated 0% by ARA, indicating a pro-privatization stance: Strongly Favors topic 6
Vouchers for school choice
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Education decisions best made at local level: Favors topic 7
Denounce the Common Core State Standards: Favors topic 7
EPA regulations are too restrictive
(-3 points on Social scale)
Stricter punishment reduces crime
(-5 points on Social scale)
Fully monitor sexual predators & bring them to justice: Favors topic 9
Supports the death penalty: Strongly Favors topic 9
Absolute right to gun ownership
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Opposes restricting the Second Amendment: Favors topic 10
NO on banning high-capacity magazines of over 10 bullets: Strongly Favors topic 10
Higher taxes on the wealthy
(+2 points on Economic scale)
Permanent Washington elite protects the tax code: Opposes topic 11
Adopt a single-rate tax system: Strongly Opposes topic 11
Repeal tax hikes in capital gains and death tax: Strongly Opposes topic 11
Supports the Taxpayer Protection Pledge: Strongly Opposes topic 11
Opposes increasing tax rates: Opposes topic 11
Supports eliminating the inheritance tax: Opposes topic 11
Pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens
(-5 points on Social scale)
Defund amnesty; and refuse any nominees until rescinded: Strongly Opposes topic 12
No path to citizenship for 1.65 million illegals in Texas: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Give police more power to ask about immigration status: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Boots on the ground, plus a wall: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Triple the size of the Border Patrol: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Strengthen border security and increase enforcement: Strongly Opposes topic 12
Support & expand free trade
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Support American Exceptionalism
(+5 points on Economic scale)
America is indispensable; our allies need our leadership: Strongly Favors topic 14
US has a responsibility to defend our values abroad: Favors topic 14
Sponsored opposing the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty: Strongly Favors topic 14
Oppose the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty: Favors topic 14
Expand the military
(-5 points on Social scale)
Fierce advocate of recruiting and growing the military: Strongly Favors topic 15
Make voter registration easier
(0 points on Social scale)
Require voters to show ID to avoid voter fraud: Opposes topic 16
Avoid foreign entanglements
(-3 points on Social scale)
Arm the Kurds to fight ISIS, with US air support: Opposes topic 17
Bomb ISIS back to the Stone Age: Strongly Opposes topic 17
Arm & aid the Peshmerga Kurds against ISIS: Strongly Opposes topic 17
Don’t arm Syrian rebels without a clear plan to combat ISIS: Favors topic 17
Vigorous sanctions against Putin; help eastern Ukraine: Opposes topic 17
Install Eastern European ABMs; stand up to Russia in Ukraine: Opposes topic 17
Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan went on too long: Favors topic 17
Sponsored shutting down Iranian foreign reserves: Opposes topic 17
Prioritize green energy
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Signed the No Climate Tax Pledge by AFP: Strongly Opposes topic 18
Cap-and-trade has no impact on global temperatures: Strongly Opposes topic 18
Explore proven energy reserves & keep energy prices low: Opposes topic 18
Let states lease energy rights on federal lands: Strongly Opposes topic 18
Marijuana is a gateway drug
(+2 points on Social scale)
Stimulus better than market-led recovery
(+5 points on Economic scale)
Debt ceiling limits “blank check” of federal spending: Strongly Opposes topic 20
Limit federal spending growth to per-capita inflation rate: Strongly Opposes topic 20
Supports the Cut-Cap-and-Balance Pledge: Opposes topic 20
Audit the Federal Reserve & its actions on mortgage loans: Opposes topic 20
Click here for explanation of political philosophy.
Click here for VoteMatch quiz.
VoteMatch
Candidate’s Political Philosophy
The below is a way of thinking about the candidate’s political philosophy by dividing the candidate’s VoteMatch answers into “social” and “economic” questions. It is only a theory – please take it with a grain of salt!
Social Questions: Liberals and libertarians agree in choosing the less-government answers, while conservatives and populists agree in choosing the more-restrictive answers.
Candidate’s Score
The candidate scored the following on the VoteMatch questions:
Where the candidate’s Social score meets the Economic score on the grid below is the candidate’s political philosophy. Based on the above score, the candidate is a Hard-Core Conservative.
Economic Score
This measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s economic lives. Economic issues include retirement funding, budget allocations, and taxes.
This measures how much the candidate believes government should intervene in people’s economic lives. Economic issues include retirement funding, budget allocations, and taxes.
How We Score Candidates
How we determine a candidate’s stance on each VoteMatch question:
Examples
The chart below indicates how four “hard-core” political philosophers would answer the questions. From this example, you can see how the candidate fits in with each philosophy. The candidate’s answers are on the left.
To ensure balance among political viewpoints, we arranged the wording of the questions so that half the time, the answer involving more government is answered by “support”, and half the time by “oppose.” Hence, each of the “hard core” philosophers would choose “support” for 5 of the Social questions and for 5 of the Economic questions.
Many of these statements cross over the line between social issues and economic issues. And many people might answer what we call a “Social” issue based on economic reasoning. But we have tried to arrange a series of questions which separates the way candidates think about government activities in these two broad scales.
Political Map and some content from Advocates for Self-Government.
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 121-123
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 118-120
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 113 -117
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 106-108
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 101-103
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 98-100
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 94-97
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Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 88-90
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 84-87
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 79-83
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 74-78
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 71-73
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 68-70
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 65-67
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 62-64
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 58-61
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 55-57
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 52-54
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 49-51
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 45-48
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 41-44
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 38-40
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 34-37
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 30-33
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 27-29
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 17-26
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 16-22
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 10-15
Listen To Pronk Pops Podcast or Download Shows 01-09
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