FEE on "the 'Libertarian-Minded' Pierre Poilievre"

The world's oldest libertarian thinktank, the Foundation for Economic Education, acknowledges Pierre Poilievre's 'libertarian streak' but notes he will be limited in how far he can change Canada's governance.

Taymaz Valley, Poilievre at Iran protest, October 2022. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Meet Canada’s Next Prime Minister — the ‘Libertarian-Minded’ Pierre Poilievre | Foundation for Economic Education | Patrick Carroll:

February 5, 2025 - "Born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1979, Pierre Poilievre has been involved in politics nearly his entire life. After earning a BA in international relations at the University of Calgary, he went on to become a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) in 2004 at the age of 25. He has worked as an MP ever since, slowly climbing the Party ladder, becoming leader in 2022. 

"Poilievre’s political philosophy is essentially conservative, but what makes him unusual is that he also has a considerable libertarian streak — a rare quality in the upper echelons of Canadian politics. In his teens he read Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, a book he later cited as 'seminal' to his political thinking. As a second-year undergraduate in 1999, he was a finalist in the national As Prime Minister, I Would… essay contest, winning $10,000 and a four-month internship at Magna International. His entry, 'Building Canada Through Freedom,' spells out his principles — and his ambitions — in no uncertain terms:

Therefore, as Prime Minister, what I would do to improve living standards is not nearly as important as what I would not do. As Prime Minister, I would relinquish to citizens as much of my social, political, and economic control as possible, leaving people to cultivate their own personal prosperity and to govern their own affairs as directly as possible.

"His focus on liberty has continued throughout his career. He described himself as 'libertarian-minded' to media outlets when he first became an MP in 2004 and is regularly criticized by those on the left for viewing free markets favorably and government intervention with suspicion.... 

"Poilievre’s pro-freedom credentials were further underscored when he was interviewed on Robert Breedlove’s podcast in 2022.... Poilievre told Breedlove he was a regular listener and fan of the show. This in itself is revealing: Breedlove is a Bitcoiner, a self-described 'Freedom Maximalist,' and an influential figure in the modern liberty movement. Poilievre went on to reference 'one of my favorite economists, Thomas Sowell,' and specifically cited Sowell’s famous 'first lesson' quote: 'The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics'....

"Poilievre is tapping into the classical liberal side of the Canadian identity. He has been especially focused on his plan to 'Axe the Carbon Tax,' referring to a divisive carbon tax-and-rebate program introduced by the Liberals in 2019 as part of their climate agenda. But while he will likely succeed in rolling back the carbon tax, there is reason to doubt that he will be able to make any sizable pro-freedom changes.

"Poilievre may be libertarian-minded at heart, but most Canadian voters are not. Thus, if he wants to get elected, he needs to present Canadians with a considerably moderated version of his ideas, and that’s exactly what he’s been doing. In his mind, presumably, it’s better to get elected on a moderate platform than campaign on what he actually believes and lose in a landslide. Unfortunately, even if this strategy works and he becomes Prime Minister, he will be severely limited in his ability to make any meaningful changes, because he will almost certainly be ousted from power should he ever try to do so.

"There’s an interesting lesson here about power. While it’s easy to think that the person in charge can do whatever they want within constitutional limits, the fact is that they are always beholden to the will of the majority. And as Ludwig von Mises argued — echoing Étienne de la Boétie and David Hume — this isn’t just true of democracies; it’s true of all systems of government. Political 'might' always rests, not on force, but on opinion. If a ruler won’t exercise power in a way that comports with public opinion, they are quickly replaced by someone who will — violently, if necessary.... 

"Poilievre may want to move Canada in a free market, classical liberal direction. He may have great intentions for removing government regulations in both the economic and social spheres. But the problem is that Canadian public opinion is still thoroughly statist."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/meet-canadas-next-prime-minister-the-libertarian-minded-pierre-poilievre/

Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life (w/ Andrew Lawton, True North) | Conversations That Matter | August 23, 2024:

Is the free market just a Big Myth?

Is the free market just a myth dreamed up and propagandized by big business and libertarian economists?

The Big Myth Is Full of Recycled Anti-Capitalist Cheap Shots | Reason - Phillip W. Magness:

February 25, 2023 - "New academic 'histories' now appear on a near-monthly basis, each blaming a variety of social ills on the conspiratorial machinations around a single idea: the free market. Almost everything in this genre follows the same formula. When the American electorate fails to embrace the political priorities of an Ivy League humanities department, these disheartened authors cast about for a blameworthy culprit. They settle on 'market fundamentalism' or 'neoliberalism.' The explanation then takes a paranoid turn, declaring the targeted theories a 'manufactured myth' arising from the 'inventions' of 20th century business interests.... All eventually settle on a mundane conspiracy of business interests and libertarian economists, who allegedly derailed America from its progressive path by convincing people that markets work better than government at solving problems.

"At some 550 pages, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us To Loathe Government and Love the Free Market is among the most loquacious entrants into this crowded literature. Harvard University's Naomi Oreskes and California Institute of Technology historian Erik Conway lay out their conspiracy theory with formulaic precision, but their book is atypical in one significant way. While most of the other works in the anti-neoliberalism genre manage at least to excavate some interesting archival findings about libertarian economists (before badly misinterpreting them), this book is remarkably light on original content.... A reader ... will be left wondering why this same story needed yet another repackaged recitation....

"The Big Myth is structured in sequential vignettes about various themes and figures such as Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Friedrich Hayek, Rose Wilder Lane, and Milton Friedman, all of whom are portrayed as either willing propagandists for big business or hapless dupes of the same. The authors expend almost no effort on understanding the arguments of the thinkers they set out to debunk.

"A revealing example appears in the book's treatment of Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil." Read's story is a fairly straightforward allegory for Adam Smith's famous concept of the "invisible hand," showing how complex social coordination arises from routine economic exchanges and signals in the absence of a centralized design. To Oreskes and Conway, however, the metaphor is literally the hand of God working from above to ensure the market system provides. As they put it, 'God made the marketplace and the marketplace made the pencil; ergo God made the pencil'....

"Interpretive peculiarities continue in their treatment of Ludwig von Mises' Socialism. After initially acknowledging that the book was written in German in 1922, Oreskes and Conway soon drift into anachronism by insinuating that it was intended as a critique of President Franklin Roosevelt. ("Mises's use of the term socialism was misleading," they contend, "because no credible American political leader in 1944 was advocating central planning.") They augment this ascription of prophecy with a sleight of hand, replacing the revolutionary Marxists of Mises' original commentaries with the comparatively benign Norman Thomas as their own preferred avatar of socialism. Like other texts in the anti-neoliberalism genre, The Big Myth removes 20th century free market authors from their historical context by hand-waving the Soviet Union out of existence and proceeding as if socialism means nothing more than a narrow swath of modern Scandinavian social democracies.

"Such errors are frequently paired with another recurring theme: the authors' fundamental inability to approach their opponents with anything remotely resembling intellectual charity. The book is filled with gratuitous swipes, many of them comically ahistorical. This usually means either a false accusation of racism or a disparaging attack on a target's qualifications. Mises receives both types of abuse. After dubbing him an 'absolutist who sympathized with fascism,' Oreskes and Conway launch into an extended attack on the Austrian economist's migration to the United States in 1940. In their telling, Mises ... struggled to find a respectable academic job until 'dark money' funders created a succession of positions for him at New York University..... Meanwhile, Mises' academic work in the United States gained higher honors than either Oreskes or Conway has ever achieved.... 

"They casually brand Milton Friedman a 'racist extremist' and defender of segregation, but not for any actual defense of segregation. The authors simply disagree with his argument that markets were more effective tools for bringing about integration than government edicts.....

"They accuse Friedrich Hayek of eschewing 'the essence of scholarship,' which 'is to look past the immediacies of time and place,' while themselves constantly processing history through their modern partisan commitments. They accuse free market economists of venturing outside their scientific expertise while offering their own decidedly nonexpert opinions on everything from economic inequality to COVID-19.

"The authors' discussion of the latter subject, which closes the book, is unintentionally comedic. Oreskes and Conway use the pandemic to contrast U.S. 'market failure' with the alleged success of 'countries that mounted a strong, coordinated response,' China foremost among them. As their book went to press, China's centralized 'zero-COVID' regime was collapsing into the same unfettered disease spread that Oreskes and Conway ascribe to free markets. But readers should not expect any self-interrogation from this pair."

Read more: https://reason.com/2023/02/25/the-big-myth-is-full-of-recycled-anti-capitalist-cheap-shots/

Covid-19 pandemic is a crisis of democracy

A Crisis of Democracy

by George J. Dance

Image courtesy U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

It is no exaggeration to call the coronavirus pandemic a crisis. While the virus itself has turned out to be less dangerous than Covid Cultists believe – not one country has experienced the millions of deaths they have been prophesying since March – governments' responses to it throughout the democratic world have spawned numerous other crises, from mass unemployment to civil unrest, that have been progressively tearing away at the social fabric. The very idea of a democratic state, as a viable form of government, is being called into serious question. 

"Democracy" (rule by all the people) has always been not one concept, but a bundle of coexisting ones. Two of those concepts of democracy have always been in conflict. The coronavirus crisis has exposed those hidden conflicts as never before.   

One vision of democracy, which we can call liberal or libertarian democracy, was summed up by economist (and armchair sociologist) Ludwig von Mises this way:

For the sake of domestic peace liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary; it is the very means of preventing revolutions and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority. When the men in office and their policies no longer please the majority of the nation, they will – in the next election – be eliminated and replaced by other men espousing different policies. 

Democracy, in other words, served a libertarian end: as a means of eliminating force from politics, it was a major step toward the libertarian ideal of eliminating force from social relations. So it was good in itself. As well, as many libertarian ideas do, it brought other significant benefits. 

One benefit was to instantiate what sociologist Vilfredo Pareto called the "circulation of elites". Every human society of record has been divided into an elite, which lives the good life and calls the shots, and the riffraff underneath; perhaps, given how humans live in groups, that division is a necessary part of society. In precapitalist societies, that division was fixed: if you were born a lord you could expect to be a lord all your life; if you were born a peasant, you could expect to always be a peasant. The rise of capitalism, though, abolished that fixed order, making it possible for individuals to move into and out of the elite; the lowest floor sweeper in a factory could theoretically become a factory owner, and vice versa. Democracy extended the 'circulation' principle into government: in America any native-born child could grow up to be President. 

As a further benefit of adopting the 'circulation' principle, members of the governing elite now had to consider the point of view of the non-elite as well. A Prime Minister might be able to pile high taxes on the private citizens; but now he had to face the real possibility of becoming a private citizen and having to pay those taxes himself. That brought about a common interest, on the part of governors and citizens alike, in limiting what government could do to its citizens. Thus democracy led to the idea of limiting government power constitutionally, through formal checks and balances that restricted how governments could make law – the Rule of Law not men – and through bills of human rights, which limited what governments were allowed to make laws about. 

To libertarians, then, democracy was seen as a good because it was a means to achieving good ends. However, there were other democratic thinkers, to whom "pleas[ing] the majority of the nation" was not a means to an end, but the very end itself. In their view, a democratic government was the expression and will of the people – achieving the will of the people was the supreme political good –and therefore whatever a democratic government did (unless, of course, it were taken over by bad people) was always good. It followed that restrictions on government like bills of rights were bad things, encumbrances that prevented governments from doing as much good as possible.  

This second view can be called the totalitarian view of democracy. The word 'totalitarian' is no stretch; at the limit, it implies that government may do whatever it wants to any individual it wants, so long as a majority wants it to; in short, it contradicts the very idea of human rights. Novelist (and armchair philosopher) Ayn Rand called it:

a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.... 

If we discard morality and substitute for it the Collectivist doctrine of unlimited majority rule [Rand also wrote], if we accept the idea that a majority may do anything it pleases, and that anything done by a majority is right because it’s done by a majority (this being the only standard of right and wrong) – how are men to apply this in practice to their actual lives? Who is the majority? In relation to each particular man, all other men are potential members of that majority which may destroy him at its pleasure at any moment. Then each man and all men become enemies; each has to fear and suspect all; each must try to rob and murder first, before he is robbed and murdered.

Those two visions of democracy have always co-existed in precarious balance in democratic states; but the Covid pandemic has utterly destroyed that balance. 

Democratic governments' interventions in the pandemic have been paradigm examples of totalitarian democracy. Contrary to what some may believe, lockdowns (and their component  measures) are enormously popular. The Covid Cult that swept the world convinced millions that they were going to die of this new plague, and that only governments could save them. Since then, massive majorities throughout the world have been demanding that their governments save them, rewarding those who acted quickly to close down society, and punishing those who held back. It is wrong for libertarians to call the result 'tyranny,' for it is the very opposite: it is the government carrying out the popular will.

Meanwhile, the rights of the people are being trampled. People have seen their livelihoods taken away. They are routinely arrested, and even roughed up, by the police, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are being arrested for their social media posts. They are being shot for breaking curfew. Life under lockdown is becoming a human rights nightmare. 

Even the Rule of Law has vanished; for this Covid totalitarianism has been happening, for the most part without any opposition, as if the constitution and the normal laws do not exist. Those have not been amended but are simply ignored, with the executive branch of government dictating whatever it wants done by executive order. Opposition parties, with their eyes on the same polls the government is reading, simply play along. A few courts have stood up for the Rule of Law by striking down some government actions; but those too have been demonized by the Covid Cult as "endanger[ing] thousands of lives," and in some cases their decisions have been ignored and the laws they struck down have still been enforced.  

In short, totalitarian democracy has become the official program of most democratic nations, while libertarian democracy has been discarded. This is an example of 'spontaneous order': No one planned for their country to become totalitarian; democratic governments have simply stumbled into totalitarianism, or been pushed into it by their citizens.

The silver lining to that cloud is that, while democratic majorities still support Covid totalitarianism, they have never approved of totalitarian democracy. As they gain experience of life in a totalitarian state, they cannot be counted on to support its continuance. Its tenets are being challenged by a growing number of scientists, philosophers, thinkers and even politicians. Official protests against Covid totalitarianism, though small and sporadic, are each week growing in number; while noncompliance (euphemistically referred to by governments as 'pandemic fatigue') is soaring, as the soaring case rates of Covid in America and Europe make clear. The liberal or libertarian ideal of people running their own lives, including assessing their own risks, may be down but it is certainly not out.  

I believe that in a straightforward conflict between totalitarian democracy versus liberal or libertarian democracy, the latter would win. However, that can and will happen only if enough people understand the nature of the underlying conflict.   

Atlas Shrugged and the literary critics

Who Is Ayn Rand?: - Lisa Duggan, Jacobin magasine:
The following is an excerpt from Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan (University of California Press, 2019).

August 23, 2019 - ""When Atlas Shrugged made its incendiary appearance in 1957, it cracked open the apparent political consensus in favor of the welfare state to reveal intensely warring camps. The mainstream press, leading academics, and prominent literary figures didn’t just dismiss the tome; they abhorred it. [Author Ayn] Rand herself predicted to Nathaniel Branden that her novel was 'going to be the most controversial book of this century; I’m going to be hated, vilified, lied about, smeared in every possible way.' Her characteristic grandiosity notwithstanding, she was prescient.

"Atlas Shrugged was described as 'execrable claptrap,' 'grotesque eccentricity,' and a 'shrill diatribe' comparable in its godless, heartless overwrought cruelty to Nietzschean-inflected fascism. Ex-Communist ... literary critic Granville Hicks opined in the New York Times, 'It howls in the reader’s ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention. And then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.'

"But the most notoriously devastating review came from William Buckley’s National Review. Echoing the views of many religious conservatives, ... ex-Communist ... Whittaker Chambers wrote that Atlas Shrugged substitutes 'the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross,' presenting the 'Randian Man' who, like 'Marxian Man,' is at 'the center of a godless world.' Chambers continued: 'Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.... From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"'

"These over-the-top negative reviews combined bitter rejection of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, from the Right as well as the Left, with attacks on ... the writing style and on the tone or sheer meanness of the novel. They were met with a much smaller number of equally over-the-top positive reviews and private evaluations, deeming Atlas Shrugged 'vibrant and powerful' and Rand a writer of 'dazzling virtuosity.'

"Economist Ruth Alexander, Rand’s friend, predicted that 'Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history as the outstanding novelist and most profound philosopher of the twentieth century.' A private note to the author from famed right-wing economist Ludwig von Mises praised the book as a political achievement:

Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel.... It is also – or may I say: first of all – a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled “intellectuals” and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by our governments and political parties.....

"Despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews in the mainstream press, Atlas Shrugged quickly became a word-of-mouth best seller, generating thousands of fan letters from gushing enthusiasts. Though never regarded as serious by cultural gatekeepers, the novel nonetheless became undeniably socially and politically important, sometimes compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone with the Wind, and 1984."

Read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/mean-girl-ayn-rand-culture-of-greed-lisa-duggan-excerpt
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Frank Meyer's "fusionism"

Just Don’t Call it Fusionism - Ben Lewis, Austro-Libertarian Magazine:

August 15, 2019 - "Frank Meyer ... a prominent figure in postwar American conservatism, is best known for his attempted 'fusion' of traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism. Even today, Meyer’s name is nearly synonymous with 'fusionism.' But ... the term most commonly associated with Meyer was not his creation, but rather came as something of a pejorative from his colleague and critic, L. Brent Bozell.... Meyer ... disavowed the fusionist label, saying that he was not attempting to fuse two disparate elements together, but was simply attempting to show that 'although they are sometimes presented as mutually incompatible, [they] can in reality be united within a single broad conservative political theory, since they have their roots in a common tradition and are arrayed against a common enemy'....

"[F]ollowing World War II, conservatism was as much a gathering place of opposition to contemporary political and social trends as it was a coherent movement. Two strains of this opposition, however, quickly took form: libertarianism and traditionalism. The libertarians deplored the growth of the state and the collectivization of individuals that was so common in Progressive, socialist and totalitarian societies. The traditionalists, no less concerned about the growth of the state, lamented more the obliteration of traditional society and its methods of communicating enduring values. As these two lines of thought developed, their differences of emphasis led to a tension over which was the true conservatism and the true enemy of liberalism....

"It was this tension to which Meyer devoted much of his writing.... Can the traditionalist emphasis on the attributes of a healthy society – virtue, duty and a rootedness in tradition – be combined with political philosophy that emphasizes the freedom of the individual? For Meyer, the question was not can these emphases be combined, but how they can. His answer began with understanding the proper relationship of the individual to society.

"Meyer believed that 'society is not a real entity'....  What this statement means is not that society as a framework of interrelating individuals, associations, and institutions does not exist, but that it does not exist as an actual entity that can be considered in the same manner as an individual.... 'Society and the state were made for individual men,' he wrote, 'not men for them'....  To Meyer, society is comprised of and made for individuals. It owes its existence to them, and they are its end. All social activity is oriented, fundamentally, towards the individual. Echoing Ludwig von Mises, he concluded, 'Truth has meaning only for persons; beauty illumines the consciousness only of persons; virtue can be pursued only by persons'....

"Meyer was no less concerned about the development of personal and social virtue than were the traditionalists, but he believed that ... virtuous actions could not be truly virtuous if they were not freely chosen.... 'Men cannot be forced to be … virtuous. To a certain extent, it is true, they can be forced to act as though they were virtuous. But virtue is the fruit of well-used freedom. And no act to the degree that it is coerced can partake of virtue – or vice'....

"Meyer’s position on coercion and virtue appears mostly correct, although with some clarification. As Meyer said, it seems that all coercion can do is cause people to act virtuously, not to actually be virtuous.... But the mere appearance of virtue is not the aim of the good society, rather it is actual virtue instilled in the thoughts and voluntary behavior of men.... Whatever the case, even those who have historically accepted a role for the state in the enforcement of virtue must by now admit the truth of Meyer’s statement that, 'If the state is endowed with the power to enforce virtue, the men who hold that power will enforce their own concepts as virtuous'....

"[Murray] Rothbard placed Meyer squarely in the libertarian camp, pointing out that Meyer’s case for the necessity of voluntary choice in the pursuit of virtue not only didn’t clash with the libertarian prohibition of the initiation of force, but was perfectly compatible with it. To Rothbard, Meyer’s appreciation for community and tradition, for the necessary traits of a virtuous society, were not deviations from libertarianism, but were healthy components of the holistic worldview of a thinker who took both political theory and culture seriously.

"Meyer could, perhaps, have made his arguments more appealing to traditionalists by expounding how the moral order could enforce standards of virtue.... Even so, his case against the state performing this task [was] well-argued. In a modern political society, rife with centralization, there is nothing more dangerous to virtue than for its proper defenders to relinquish their duties to the state."

Read more: https://www.austrolibertarian.com/articles/just-dont-call-it-fusionism
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The Cato Institute's "libertarian success story"

The Academy Is Unstable and Degrading. Historians Should Take Over the Government, Instead. - The Chronicle of Higher Education - Daniel Bessner:

February 27, 2019 - "What does it mean to be a public intellectual? When scholars discuss this question, they generally assume that the primary path to publicness is to engage with a mass audience.... But there is a second way that scholars, particularly those who identify with the social-democratic left, should contribute to public life: by engaging with state institutions through participation in the intellectual technostructure — think tanks, policy schools, university centers — that since World War II has shaped U.S. policy....

"The history of libertarianism, the most influential radical movement in modern U.S. history, ... indicates that intellectuals can effect significant change by working within the strictures of the American political system.... Just 70 years ago, libertarians stood on the fringes of American politics; in the last two decades, however, they have exerted a profound impact on public policy....

"The history of libertarianism’s ascent begins with Murray Rothbard, an economist who ... is today largely forgotten.... Rothbard encountered the radical free-market ideas of the Austrian exile Ludwig von Mises. Specifically, Mises’s influential Human Action (1949) inspired Rothbard to develop a political theory he dubbed 'anarcho-capitalism,' which combined anarchist philosophy with a capitalist faith in free markets.

"Rothbard spent his life spreading the libertarian gospel and organizing the budding libertarian movement. One of his most clever moves was to frame libertarianism as a fundamentally American ideology. As Rothbard argued in his For a New Liberty (1973), the American Revolution was "explicitly libertarian'... The tragedy of American history was that various events, from the Louisiana Purchase to the Civil War to the New Deal, betrayed the revolution.... For Rothbard, the goal of libertarianism was to return the nation to its supposedly anti-statist roots.

"In 1977 Rothbard helped found the Cato Institute with the aid of Edward Crane, a libertarian operative, and Charles Koch, a right-wing billionaire. Cato quickly developed the two-pronged strategy that still guides it today. First, per Rothbard’s vision, Cato seeks ... 'to identify and develop the future leaders, thinkers, advocates, and supporters of the libertarian movement, thereby promoting the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace'.... Second, Cato embraces the perspective of Crane and Koch, who wanted the think tank to affect public policy directly by producing expert reports and lobbying congresspeople and other politicians. By combining Rothbardian notions of public education with Cranian ideas of policy advocacy, Cato has brought libertarianism to the center of American politics and, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Think Tanks and Civil Societies program, has become one of the United States’ most influential think tanks, particularly in the areas of economic, education, and social policy.

"Cato’s success has a lot to teach socialist intellectuals. At the most general level, it demonstrates the importance of not limiting intellectuals’ activities to any one sphere.... Specifically, Cato’s history and present influence suggest that think tanks are critical means to develop, promote, and spread ideas that currently stand outside the mainstream. It might therefore be useful for left-wing intellectuals to create avowedly socialist think tanks."

Read more: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-Is-Unstable-and/245778
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5 essential libertarian books

5 Essential Books That Every New Libertarian Should Read - 71 Republic - Mason Mohon:

May 1, 2018 -"Books are one of life’s greatest gifts. These bound packages of paper hold knowledge, wisdom, and depth of thought that is difficult to capture in a blog post or news article.... Because of that, it is critical that any Libertarian reads books.... So, I would like to present books that I believe will only help one’s ideological journey.

"The utility of these books is based on my personal reading experience, not on some sort of objective measurement. These are also in no particular order.

"The Revolution, by Ron Paul ... was my first stepping-stone into the realm of Libertarianism. It eloquently outlines the ailments of modern American politics, the two-party system, interventionism, drug policy, and government financial control. The Revolution is a great primer that will both familiarize the reader with Libertarian ethics and introduce them to many other resources....

"The Libertarian Mind, by David Boaz, ... goes further in-depth on many issues and offers a bit more information on the historical development of Libertarianism. It draws from many facets of the Libertarian belief system, meaning the reader will get much more exposure to many of the ideas of various diverse Libertarians....

"Economics in one Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt ... explains clearly many fallacies of historical leftist and Keynesian economic ideology.... From broken windows to wartorn countries, readers will discover that many policies that seek to “stimulate” the economy are merely short-sighted....

"Excuse Me, Professor, edited by Lawrence Reed ... is a collection of essays by economists ... that seek to dispell many myths that dominate contemporary university teachings.... It covers a plethora of issues, challenging the mainstream opinion on each and every one....

"Choice, Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action by Robert Murphy.... Ludwig von Mises’s economic classic Human Action ... is daunting, sitting at over 900 pages of complex Austrian economic reasoning, yet it remains a base for Libertarian economic thinking.... To fill this void comes Murphy’s Choice, which covers most of the same information, but in a simpler and much easier to read method."

Read more (and purchasing info): https://71republic.com/2018/05/01/5-new-libertarian-books/
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The libertarian who founded a university

The Guatemalan Economic Miracle and the Man Who Helped It Happen - Foundation for Economic Education - Working for a free and prosperous world - Alfonso Abril:

March 15, 2018 - "Guatemala is a poor country, but we were richly blessed by the late Manuel 'Muso' Ayau, who was born here in 1925.... What can an honest citizen do to change a poor country for the better? Muso knew the recipe. Let me tell you how I interpret this Guatemalan hero’s vision and how his legacy contributes toward building a prosperous Guatemala.

"Our country is full of smart and passionate people. We have splendid weather, bountiful natural resources, and a strategic location with access to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. So why is Guatemala poor? The reason lies in our weak institutions and flawed ideas, not in a lack of resources. Changing ideas so people support institutional reform, and then making those institutions work in people’s favor to create a prosperous society were the challenges that Muso tackled....

"Donald Boudreaux explains some background: 'Soon encountering burdensome regulations, corrupt bureaucrats, and absurd taxes, he joined with other Guatemalan businessmen seeking to free consumers and producers from the then-dominant command-and-control regulatory regime.... But as Muso once recalled to me, "I quickly became disillusioned. Even when we won a battle now and then, we continued to lose the war against statism. I realized that we would make no real progress unless we changed the underlying ideas of the people. We had to take a long-run perspective. I learned that freedom must triumph in people’s minds and hearts before it can make any headway in politics."'

"Muso believed in education, especially the education of intellectuals and other influencers to ensure a proper understanding of economic principles and the philosophy of freedom.... In 1958, he co-founded the Center for Economic–Social Studies (CEES), which began publishing and disseminating its own analyses of Guatemalan issues and also translating and distributing classic works in freedom literature such as Frederic Bastiat’s The Law....

"Undaunted by obstacles and skepticism, he founded Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM) in 1971, now a leading private university in Guatemala City, one of the finest in Latin America, and a beacon of freedom ideas. UFM, where academic excellence is a passion, is where I studied business.

"Muso established a rule at the founding of the University: Every student, no matter what his or her major field of study, must enroll and pass the 'Economic Process and Philosophy' courses. Those courses acquaint students with the 'Austrian School' of Economics, particularly the insights of two giants among 20th Century economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek. With that policy in practice at the university now for more than 40 years, solid free-market economic ideas have been spreading, slowly but surely, across the country....

"UFM is without a doubt the most important and enduring achievement of Manuel Ayau. His energy and his spirit endow every building and room on a stunning campus — in particular, the Mises Library, the Hayek Auditorium, the Atlas Libertas Sculpture, and the Liberty Plaza. The University teaches free-market economics and the philosophy of freedom to influential leaders of the future. The budget of UFM amounts to more than $30 million per year, a very significant figure for Guatemala. Visiting intellectuals from all over the world ensure lively discussions that keep the professors experts on the most innovative trends and ideas."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/the-guatemalan-economic-miracle-and-the-man-who-helped-it-happen/
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Bettina Bien Greaves dead at 100

Bettina Bien Greaves, R.I.P. | Liberty Unbound - Mark Skousen:

January 28, 2018 - "All scholars dream of having one or more disciples who will make sure their legacy is kept alive and their works and theories prominently trumpeted before the public eye.

"For the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, there was quite a following, including two couples, Hans and Mary Sennholz, and Percy and Bettina Greaves. On January 22 the last of the four, Bettina Bien Greaves, died at the astounding age of 100. (Mary Sennholz also lived to be 100)....

"Bettina Greaves deserves to be honored as Mises’ most devoted student, and in July a room will be dedicated to her at the annual FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas.

"From the time she first heard Mises speak in 1951 at a Freeman seminar in Washington Square in New York City, Bettina was smitten. With a background in shorthand and secretarial work during the war years, she attended Mises’ famous New York University graduate seminar, taking copious notes on every lecture from 1951 until 1969. Although she had no formal training in economics, Greaves was the queen of the Austrian school and never deviated from it. She joined the Foundation [for] Economic Education (FEE) staff in 1953 and worked at the FEE mansion for the rest of her career. She survived everyone, including founder Leonard Read. After retiring, she stayed on as a board member and even donated her home in New York to FEE....

"She focused her career on advancing the works and ideas of the Austrian school, including the contributions by Henry Hazlitt and Hans Sennholz. She wrote many articles for The Freeman, gave lectures, and compiled anthologies about Austrian economics. She spearheaded FEE’s program to provide libertarian material for high school debaters with packets on foreign aid, government regulations, medical care, and other issues. She compiled and edited Free Market Economics: A Syllabus and Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader, a two-volume set that was distributed to thousands of students and teachers....

"But her main interest was always in her mentor, Ludwig von Mises.... She compiled, edited, and translated many of his books after his death in 1973. She also worked with her husband Percy [on a book] ... published in 1974, called Mises Made Easier (but never easy!). With the help of Robert W. McGee, she published an exhaustive Mises: An Annotated Bibliography (FEE, 1993, 1995). When the Liberty Fund decided to publish the complete works of Mises, Bettina was asked to be the editor, writing introductions for each volume."

Read more: http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/1808
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Paleolibertarianism's appeal to the alt.right

The Rhetoric of Libertarians and the Unfortunate Appeal to the Alt-Right - Bleeding Heart Libertarians - Steve Horwitz:

August 4, 2017 - "The paleo-libertarian seed that Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, and Lew Rockwell planted in the 1990s has come to bear some really ugly fruit in the last couple of years as elements of the alt-right have made appearances in various libertarian organizations and venues. Back in February, alt-right hero Richard Spencer stirred up a fuss at the International Students for Liberty Conference in DC after being invited to hang out by a group of students calling themselves the “Hoppe Caucus.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, long associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute as well as a panoply of racists and anti-Semites, is perhaps the most popular gateway drug for the alt-right incursion into libertarianism.

"And within the last couple of weeks, Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute delivered a talk to students at Mises University entitled “For a New Libertarian.” In that talk, he knocks down an extended strawman of what he thinks constitutes the libertarianism he wants them to reject – what many might call “left-libertarianism'.... Most controversially, Deist, after continuing to argue that family, faith, and the like are the cultural glue that humans need and that libertarians should focus on, decided to end with:

In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance.

"For those who know something about the history of the 20th century, the invocation of 'blood and soil' as something that libertarians should recognize as a valid concern and should appeal to should be chilling. That phrase, which has a history going back at least to the 19th century, was central to the Nazi movement and was at the core of their justification for eliminating those people who did not have connections to the German homeland. It remains a watchword of the nastiest elements on the right, as a quick visit to bloodandsoil.org will demonstrate....

"Perhaps Deist didn’t know all of that. If so, one would expect a decent person to immediately apologize for using that phrase that way in that context. To my knowledge, no such apology has appeared. On the assumption that he is not, in fact, a Nazi, the explanation left standing is that he and his defenders have no problem using rhetoric that will attract those sympathetic to Nazi-like views about nativism and Jews. It’s that lack of concern about engaging in that sort of rhetoric, if not a positive willingness to do so, that is so troubling here, and it is eating away at the liberal roots of libertarianism.....

As I pointed out with the Paul newsletters, all of this appeal to nativism, racism, and anti-Semitism and the like is in deep conflict with libertarianism’s liberalism. It’s particularly in conflict with the liberal cosmopolitanism of someone like Mises. And the use of Nazi language is especially galling as it was the very 'blood and soil' crowd who drove the Jewish Mises out of Vienna....

"Our history is one of liberal tolerance, universalism, and cosmopolitanism, putting the freedom and harmony of all people ahead of the supposed interests of any parochial sub-group, and especially ones defined by the artificial boundaries of nation-states and their subsets. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance."

Read more: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2017/08/rhetoric-libertarians-unfortunate-appeal-alt-right/
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Guatemala's free-market university

The Bond villain libertarians of Guatemala - Don Hannan, Washington Examiner:

December 19, 2016 - "Hidden away in Guatemala, surrounded by tall jungle trees, ... Francisco Marroquin University has been turning out free-marketeers for 45 years....

"The buildings are named after F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian School economists. There is a Plaza Adam Smith... One of the buildings is adorned with a massive sculpture of Atlas holding the world aloft — a homage to that vinegary anti-collectivist Ayn Rand. She would have approved of the way that lecturers must bid for teaching aids according to an internal market, with prices rising at popular times.

"Francisco Marroquin — named after the first Bishop of Guatemala, who translated several of the indigenous languages — is one of the best universities in Latin America. Its fees are at the upper end of the range, and it sets stiff entrance criteria, including a required fluency in English. All its undergraduates, whether they are studying law, medicine or architecture, are given a basic grounding in the principles of personal liberty and limited government....

"What makes Francisco Marroquin unusual is not that it seeks to inculcate values. Rather, it's that those values are not the leftist ones prevalent in almost every other institution of higher education. Instead of promoting anti-racism as the supreme political value, Francisco Marroquin promotes freedom. Safe spaces, micro-aggressions and trigger warnings have no place in these handsome buildings. Students are constantly exhorted to think for themselves....

"The free-market liberalism taught here has a samizdat feel. Most undergraduates are as opposed to the big-government paternalism that passes for conservatism in Latin America as they are to the Left.

"Which is why the best hope for the region lies in these young people. With the partial exceptions of Chile and Colombia, open markets have never really been tried in Latin America.... Latin America's underlying problem remains unaddressed.

"Governments are simultaneously too large and too small. Too large in the sense that they aim to control industries, dictate wages, set prices. Too small in the sense that they fail to operate impartial legal systems through which private citizens can claim redress....

"Just as the London School of Economics educated a generation of post-colonial leaders in Asia and Africa, with dire consequences, so there is now a crying need in Latin America for leaders who understand the difference between being pro-business and being pro-market. Every alternative has failed."

Read more: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-bond-villain-libertarians-of-guatemala/article/2609902
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Fascists and progressives

by George J. Dance

Alt.right author James Miller believes that "Fascism has an undeserved bad reputation." In his view: "Regardless of this reputation, Fascism is a very sensible economic and social ideology." He goes on to offer the following definition:

Fascism is an economic system in which a nation’s government plays a central role in monitoring all banking, trade, production, and labor activity which takes place within the nation. Such monitoring is done for the sole purpose of safeguarding and advancing the nation and its people. Under Fascism, the government will not approve of any business activity unless that business has a positive impact on the nation as a whole and the people of the nation — this is the axiom which determines everything under Fascism.[1]

Interestingly, this definition of fascism (which looks correct) also looks like a correct definition of progressivism, the economic philosophy of the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and every Democratic president since (save perhaps Truman and Clinton), and some Republican presidents as well (Gerald Ford, G.H.W. Bush).

Like socialism, fascism and progressivism are variants of statism: the belief that state control of society and the economy is necessary to bring about and maintain a good society. But while socialists try to achieve that control directly, through government ownership and increased government spending, progressives and fascists try to achieve it indirectly through regulation, oversight, and management of nominally private businesses and workers.

As the historical record shows, the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, and the progressive regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were composed of mutual admirers, who followed a similar politico-economic agenda. As David Gordon of the Mises Institue has documented:

• The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, "stressed 'Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,' praising the president's style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler's own dictatorial Führerprinzip" (p. 190).
• Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He "told American ambassador William Dodd that he was 'in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan "The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual"'" (pp. 19-20)....
• Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt's Looking Forward. He found "reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices"(pp. 23-24)....
• Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. "'I don't mind telling you in confidence,' FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, 'that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'" (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini's program to modernize Italy: "It's the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious" (p. 32)[2]

Because (unlike socialism), fascism and progressivism do not directly challenge a country's economic status quo, they can appeal to the conservative as well as the totalitarian biases that I have argued exist in modern political societies.[3] However, like socialism, fascism and progressivism imply a radical restructuring of society, with state power vastly increased at the expense of individual rights and liberties.

This ideological symmetry can lead to tactical symmetries: for instance, historical fascism relied on tactics of political violence copied from those on the radical left (the anarchists and Bolsheviks).[4] Progressives, on the other hand, initially rejected those methods; one fundamental difference between progressives and fascists. That was because radical leftism and fascism were populist, bottom-up movements, while progressivism began as a thoroughly top-down, establishment movement. However, the mass-based, bottom-up progressivism that began in North America in the 1960s has increasingly also adopted political violence tactics from the radical left, further blurring the difference between the fascist and progressive ideologies.

Notes

[1] James Miller, "What is Fascism," Kevin Alfred Strong blog, August 13, 2012.  http://www.kevinalfredstrom.com/2012/08/what-is-fascism/

[2] David Gordon, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR" (review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Metropolitan Books, 2006). Mises Daily, September 22, 2006, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/three-new-deals-why-nazis-and-fascists-loved-fdr

[3] George J. Dance, "Why are there no libertarian countries?", Nolan Chart, April 29, 2017.
https://www.nolanchart.com/why-are-there-no-libertarian-countries

[4] Ludwig von Mises, "The Argument of Fascism," Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (translated by Ralph Raico). Foundation for Economic Education, 1985, 29. Books / Digital Texts, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition/html/p/29 

Libertarians, conservatives, and progressives

The case for libertarianism in American politics | TheHill - David D'Amato:

June 8, 2017 - "Libertarianism is not conservatism, nor is it an offshoot of conservatism, a subset, or even a relative of common extraction ... because libertarian political philosophy is best understood as a radicalization of traditional liberalism.... The radical, going as she does to the root, hopes to provoke change at the deepest sub strata of society, motivated by the conviction that the political and economic status quo is fundamentally unjust.

"Libertarians believe that the best is yet to come, that history has been the bloodstained story of unscrupulous ruling thugs and their many misdeeds, their constant crimes against law, order, and justice....

"Historian Larry Siedentop goes so far as to argue that ... many of the concepts and modes of argument long credited to socialism were in fact 'introduced by liberal thinkers'.... For example, libertarians have been quick to call attention to the fact that early French liberals developed a pre-socialist (or perhaps proto-socialist) class theory, embedded in which was an argument for radical laissez-faire....

"In America, individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker explicitly identified themselves as socialists even as they advocated 'a perfectly free market,' in which only force or fraud would be out of bounds.... The capitalist, for Tucker, was 'guilty of criminal invasion,' of violating the central libertarian law against the use of aggression against the non-invasive individual. He worried that many of those employing what seemed libertarian-sounding language had actually become the mouthpieces of 'the capitalistic class.' That class had achieved wealth and power not by competing for consumers’ hard-earned dollars, but 'by abolishing the free market,' by using the coercive power of the state to artificially limit the range of competition.

"Throughout the 20th century, some stalwart proponents of the peaceful, cosmopolitan order produced by free trade and respect for private property rights have continued to identify as liberals.... Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, with whom modern libertarianism is so often associated, were such committed liberals, dependably opposed to conservatism and, in Hayek’s works, its 'propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge.'.... As a philosophy of universal individual rights, libertarian[ism] contemplates a deep break with centuries-old orders of power and privilege, in which a handful of political and ecclesiastical authorities made the rules and reaped the rewards....

"Because the dominance of today’s corporate powerhouses rests largely on government privilege, and thus violence — not voluntary, mutually beneficial trade — the anti-corporate rhetoric of progressives rings hollow; they emphasize wealth inequality and economic justice, yet they would expand the very power on which corporate abuses now rest. American political history finds self-described progressives among the most reliable guardians of corporate welfare.

"Libertarianism is a principled alternative to conservatism and progressivism, both of which, at base, represent authority against liberty."

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/national-party-news/336992-the-case-for-libertarianism-in-american-politics
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Ralph Raico (1936-2016)

Ralph Raico, RIP | Cato @ Liberty - Jim Powell:

December 14, 2016 - I was saddened by the news of Ralph Raico’s passing on December 13.

At Cato summer seminars during the 1980s, he delivered fabulous lectures about the history of liberty and its adversaries. He focused on European intellectual history and the development of classical liberalism. He was clear, concise and passionate, and his talks sparkled with memorable details. I still cherish audio cassettes of those lectures.

Ralph attended the Bronx High School of Science, earned a B.A. at the City College of New York, and joined the New York libertarian underground during the 1950s. His friends included Ronald Hamowy, Leonard Liggio, George Reisman, Robert Hessen, and other eager students of liberty. For a while, Ralph and his group, calling themselves the “Circle Bastiat,” met for discussions with Ayn Rand’s group, “the Collective.” Ludwig von Mises invited Ralph to attend his graduate seminars at New York University. Ralph became a close friend of Murray and Joey Rothbard.

By 1960, Ralph was at the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. in intellectual history. F.A. Hayek was his thesis advisor. Ralph started a quarterly student journal called New Individualist Review and served as editor-in-chief. Each issue featured about a half-dozen articles. The first issue appeared in April 1961. The lead article was “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman. The second issue featured “Freedom and Coercion” by Hayek. And so it went, a cavalcade of scholarly stars, including three future Nobel Laureates. The authors included George Stigler, Yale Brozen, Karl Brunner, Henry Hazlitt, W.H. Hutt, David Levy, Walter Oi, Sam Peltzman, Wilhelm Roepke, B.R. Shenoy, Gordon Tullock, Joe Cobb, and E.G. West, in addition to Hayek and Friedman. A few conservatives joined the fun, too — William F. Buckley, Jr., M. Stanton Evans, and Russell Kirk.

As it happened, in 1962, when I had to decide on a college, I received a subscription flyer for New Individualist Review. I was familiar with a number of the authors, because I had read issues of The Freeman that my father had in his home office, and they published some of the same authors. So, the University of Chicago was where I had to go. While many college kids did fraternities or football, I did NIR. I met Ralph, joined the staff of New Individualist Review, and altogether 17 issues were published. NIR involved insightful, inspiring, and sometimes amusing exchanges among students and professors in history, economics, philosophy, science, law, and business. For better or worse, NIR was a spontaneous phenomenon that never focused on becoming an institution. Gradually, everybody got their degrees and moved on. I was the last editor-in-chief (1968).

Ralph had so much literary talent that there were hopes he might produce a glorious history of liberty, like Lord Acton talked so much about but never started. Alas, time slipped through their fingers and—for now—that big story is still out there.

Nonetheless, Ralph became known for elegantly-crafted articles, pamphlets, and chapter contributions that helped illuminate the history of liberty.

Ralph translated Mises’ 1927 book Liberalismus, an excellent basic statement of classical liberalism, into English (1962), and a number of publishers have reissued his splendid translation.

He also wrote:

• Die Partei der Freiheit: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus (1999), about the fateful struggles of German classical liberals during the 19th century.
• The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton (2010), his University of Chicago Ph.D. thesis.
• Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (2012). 

https://www.cato.org/blog/ralph-raico-rip

This work by Cato Institute is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

20th-century libertarian beginnings traced by anti-libertarian group

from "Against the Libertarian Party" | Jacobin - Branko Marcetic:

November 4, 2016 - "The modern libertarian movement has its roots in the 1930s, when a host of business leaders, terrified by Roosevelt’s New Deal, set up a series of overlapping organizations to oppose what they saw as a government incursion.

"One such group was the American Liberty League, founded in 1934 by executives from General Motors, US Steel, and other corporations, as well as three members of the du Pont family (who owned the DuPont Chemical Company).

"Another was the Volker Fund, a charitable trust set up in 1932 by Kansas City businessman William Volker (who put his nephew Harold Luhnow in charge). The fund sponsored various right-wing initiatives, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, an annual summit of pro-market scholars, journalists, and businessmen. It also helped subsidize the careers of various free-market intellectuals, such as Ludwig von Mises (“the fountainhead of modern libertarianism”) and, even more importantly, Friedrich von Hayek (whose 1947 book Road to Serfdom is widely viewed as kickstarting the free-market right’s intellectual resurgence).

"Two of the nascent movement’s most important backers were also drawn from the ranks of corporate America: J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil, and Jasper Crane, the former executive vice president of DuPont Chemical.

"Both had helped lead the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a vehemently anti-union business organization. Pew went on to bankroll the Liberty League, as well as conferences, advocacy groups, and the conservative Christian organization Spiritual Mobilization, which put out the Christian libertarian magazine Faith and Freedom in the 1950s. Crane helped organize, and used his business connections to fund, the Mont Pelerin Society and a whole host of other initiatives. He, along with the du Pont family, would go on to donate to Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964.

"Perhaps the most important libertarian cause Pew and Crane were involved in was the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), an organization that sought to teach the public about libertarian ideas.

"Both acted as trustees, joined by an array of corporate executives: Donaldson Brown, a former executive of both DuPont and General Motors; Erle P. Halliburton, the founder of Halliburton; A.C. Mattei, the president of Honolulu Oil Corporation; Hughston McBain, president and chairman of Marshall Field & Company; W.C. Mullendore, executive vice president of the Southern California Edison Company; Charles White, president of Republic Steel; and B.E. Hutchinson, chairman of Chrysler’s finance committee. (The Volcker Fund’s Harold Luhnow was also a trustee.)

"Pew and Crane’s participation in the libertarian movement and its corporate circles didn’t end there. The pair sat on the board of the Freeman, the movement’s flagship magazine, alongside a smattering of businessmen.

"Major firms bankrolled the Freeman through advertising that doubled as ideological propaganda. Instead of touting their products, major firms like Chrysler, DuPont, Republic Steel, Marshall Field, General Motors, and Sun Oil — whose executives, past and present, were involved in the FEE and older anti-New Deal groups — took out ads promoting the virtues of business and the free market. (During the 1950s and 1960s, General Electric — also a frequent Freeman advertiser and a member of NAM — featured the publication on its anti-union reading list for managers and supervisors as part of its effort to delegitimize labor leaders.)"

Read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/libertarian-party-gary-johnson-ron-paul-president/  "
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The teenager behind the Free Brazil Movement

Teen libertarian is face of Brazil's young free-market right - Yahoo News - Adriana Gomez Licon:

March 30, 2015 - "Microphone in hand and standing atop the sound truck, the raspy-voiced protest leader jabbed his finger into the air shouting for the ouster of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, igniting wild cheers from the crowd below him.

"'What Lula and Dilma have done shouldn't just result in their being banned from politics. It should result in them being in jail!' Kim Kataguiri yelled, denouncing Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

"The March 15 demonstration was the largest Sao Paulo had seen in more than three decades...  But more surprising than the crowd of more than 200,000, according to the Datafolha polling and statistics agency, was the fact it was being led by Kataguiri, a skinny, 19-year-old college dropout, and other young Brazilian activists inspired by libertarianism and conservative free-market ideals.

"The grandson of Japanese immigrants, Kataguiri is a social media star whose quirky videos skewer Rousseff and the ruling party's social welfare policies.... Today, he is the public face of the Free Brazil Movement, a ... right-leaning movement clearly channeled against Rousseff and her Workers' Party....

"Kataguiri says he had a political awakening two years ago.... He began posting satiric videos to YouTube, which gained a following. He joined two digital media collectives and produced more clips. Along the way, Kataguiri read the works of free-market economists Milton Friedman and Ludwig Von Mises....

"Today, Kataguiri and the Free Brazil Movement team work from an office that has a tech-startup feel, with two brown leather couches and a clothes rack holding costumes used in their videos. Tequila and mescal bottles sit along a bookshelf holding Rand Paul's The Tea Party Goes to Washington and Russell Kirk's The Politics of Prudence."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/teen-libertarian-face-brazils-young-free-market-043212589.html
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Leonard Read's collected works online at FEE

The Digitization of Leonard Read : Blog : Foundation for Economic Education - Jeffrey A. Tucker:

March 2, 2015 - "The collected works of FEE’s founder are now on FEE.org! We are super excited about this development because it gives new and permanent life to some of the wisest writings on freedom you will ever read....

"At the height of the New Deal, and four years before US entry into World War II, a new intellectual voice appeared on the national scene. His name was Leonard E. Read, head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. His book was Romance of Reality. It was a large book on economics published by Dodd, Mead, & Co., a prestigious publishing house, and it came out in 1937, just as hope that government planning would end the Depression was waning.

"Read’s approach to economics was different from almost anything else you could get your hands on at the time. It completely dismissed FDR’s New Deal in all its forms, but it went much further. It rejected all forms of control of people’s right to peacefully create, bargain, and associate. It saw government intervention, which he saw as the policy application of the principle of violence, as contributing nothing positive but only draining human energy from the project of creating prosperity.

"It was a defense of free enterprise on different grounds than most people would expect. It sounded different, and it felt different. There was nothing 'reactionary' about it. His prose was humane, with an emphasis on the future. His focus was on ethics. It traced the roots of the national problem to a failure of imagination. His proposed reform was not a political program but an intellectual and spiritual enlightenment....

"Romance of Reality appeared nearly a decade before that great moment in 1946 when Leonard Read would take the dramatic step of founding the Foundation for Economic Education. This was the realization of the dream he mapped out in this marvelous 1937 book. FEE was the nation’s first market-oriented think tank. In the postwar environment, FEE became a sanctuary for dissident European intellectuals like Ludwig von Mises, a platform for journalists like Henry Hazlitt, and a publishing venue for emergent geniuses like Milton Friedman....

"Throughout all his years at FEE, Leonard remained an active writer and intellectual force. His most famous essay on the division of labor, 'I, Pencil,' is a timeless classic, but his writings include so much more, on every topic you can imagine. His works were pored over by a generation of businesspeople and professionals who so badly needed inspiration in dark times. He provided it with his continuing themes: celebrating human creativity, warning against all forms of control, calling for individual improvement as a path toward freedom, eschewing politics as a workable solution, and pursuing the path of peace in all aspects of life."

Read more: http://fee.org/blog/detail/the-digitization-of-leonard-read
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Read's books can be accessed from the Libertarianism wiki - GD

Mises Institute promotes free markets worldwide

Libertarian think tank promotes free markets worldwide from Auburn | Auburn Plainsman | Kyle Nazario:

September 29, 2010 - "The Mises Institute is located in a small, two-story building.... Only a small sign at the front advertises an institute is there at all.

"'We are sort of a school, we’re sort of a website, we’re sort of a library and a book repository and we’re sort of a think tank,' said Jeff Deist, president of the Institute. 'We have a pretty broad mission, but first and foremost we are about keeping the legacy and the current elements of the Austrian school of economics alive and healthy'....

"Professor of economics Henry Thompson said the Austrian school of economics is a way of thinking about the economy that focuses on historical and theoretical information rather than empirical data....

"Mark Thornton, senior fellow at the Mises Institute, ... said the Austrian school of economics has an unconventional way of thinking about economic issues.

"'We’re free market (economists), which is an alternative,' Thornton said. 'Some would say it’s a radical alternative.'

"Deist said Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, the Mises Institute’s namesake, created a school of thought focusing on minimal government and private sector investment. The nationality of von Mises and Menger, both Austrian, became the collective banner for their theories.

"Work done by Mises scholars has drawn support from famous libertarians, such as Ron Paul and Andrew Napolitano, both of whom, Deist said, have spoken at the Mises Institute....

"Thornton said educating the public, not influencing government policy, is the Mises Institute’s purpose.... Mises scholars educate people through publishing on the website, Mises.org, writing academic papers, and open seminars."

Read more: http://www.theplainsman.com/view/full_story/25829423/article-Libertarian-think-tank-promotes-free-markets-worldwide-from-Auburn?instance=home_news_1st_right
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Libertarian economics behind Silk Road website

Libertarian economics underpinned Silk Road Bitcoin drug website - FT.com - John Aglionby:

October 3, 2013 - "The goods and services traded on the semi-secretive website Silk Road since February 2011 with the virtual currency Bitcoins were so varied that the Federal Bureau of Investigation described it as 'the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet today'.

"Its philosophical underpinnings, however, were ... according to the FBI complaint published on Wednesday after the site was shut down, 'Austrian economic theory' and the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, economists closely associated with the Mises Institute, in the US state of Alabama.

"The libertarian institute’s website says it 'seeks to advance the Misesian tradition of thought through the defence of the market economy, private property, sound money and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive'.

"Ross Ulbricht, Silk Road’s alleged founder who was arrested on Wednesday and allegedly made millions of dollars from running the trading site, had a user profile on the Mises Institute site and linked to the website, and cited the economists’ work in Silk Road forum postings, the FBI complaint said."

Read more: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2c1f0f78-2c17-11e3-acf4-00144feab7de.html#axzz2grWVCfoC
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