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The Austrian | January/February 2015 | 1 M ISESI NSTITUTE Vol The Austrian | January/February 2015 | 1 M ISESI NSTITUTE Vol. 1, No. 1 January – February 2015 The AustrianA PUBLICATION OF THE MISES INSTITUTE lew rockwell Makes the Libertarian Case for Secession page 4 ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Jeff Deist Introduces Our New Publication, The Austrian ......................................................2 James Bovard on The Absurdity of “Reform” in DC ............................................................6 David Gordon Reviews Judge Andrew P. Napolitano’s Suicide Pact ............................................8 Ryan McMaken on the Netflix Series Marco Polo .............................................................10 Q&A: Mises U Alum Aaron Ensley, Wisconsin’s Free-Market Evangelist .......................................12 Scholar and Alumni News ...................................................................................14 Events .......................................................................................................19 2 | January/February 2015 | The Austrian from the publisher Jeff Deist The Free Market is now The Austrian “I actually believe in the free market.” President Barack Obama, Phoenix, August 2013 “I’m a free market welfare state guy.” Paul Krugman, CNBC interview, July 2012 or more than thirty years The Free Market has been the Mises Institute’s flagship monthly Fpublication for our members. Today we introduce The Austrian, a bolder and more robust version of what you’ve known for decades. It’s enlightening these days to hear everyone from Obama and Krugman to Putin and Hollande proclaim their belief in the superiority of free markets (invariably adding several qualifying provisos, of course). Even Bono from U2 has had a change of heart. Only Mr. Piketty appears to be clinging (tenuously) to his support for outright central planning. So it appears we’ve made great strides in the rhetorical battle when it comes to the beauty and power of markets to vastly improve the human condition. We are all free-marketers now, and some of us actually mean it. Thirty years ago, however, our outspoken support for free markets was radical. And since our beginning the Mises Institute has advocated a free market in everything. But today the The Austrian A PUBLICATION OF THE MISES INSTITUTE Formerly The Free Market, 1983–2014. Published 2015 (six times per year) by the Mises Institute under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Publisher: Jeff Deist Editor: Ryan McMaken Managing Editor: Judith F. Thommesen Contributing Editors: Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Jeffrey M. Herbener, Robert Higgs, Mark Thornton Mises Institute • 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, AL 36832-4501 • 334.321.2100 • Fax: 334.321.2119 • [email protected] • mises.org. The Mises Institute is a nonprofit organization. Contributions are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. Note: the views expressed in The Austrian are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute. The Austrian | January/February 2015 | 3 The first issue of The Free Market, published in 1983, featured The Case for Free Trade by a (then) little-known Congressman from Houston, Dr. Ron Paul. It also featured a cover story by our longtime (and current) board member John Denson about the Institute’s new home at Auburn University. Appearing on the masthead of that first issue was the original Mises Institute board, and it was quite a list: Margit von Mises, John Denson, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, and Hans Sennholz! term has been diluted through overuse and misuse, spirit, and the classical liberal tradition our north as demonstrated by Messrs. Obama and Krugman. star. It no longer captures the radical and uncompro- We will publish The Austrian every other month, mising nature of the Institute and its members. A and deliver it to your mailbox or email inbox. Each name change for The Free Market was in order. issue will feature provocative articles by cutting- edge libertarian and Austrian thinkers, conver- When Mises died in 1973, “Austrian” was an sational interviews with leading business people adjective and a loose term of convenience describ- and intellectual entrepreneurs, reviews by David ing the great scholars (and scholarship) of the Aus- Gordon, and cultural commentary by guest writers. trian school of economics. You won’t find this kind of radical, politically incor- Today, thanks to phenomenal growth in the Aus- rect content anywhere else. trian school, one can simply say, “I’m an Austrian” We hope you enjoy The Austrian, and we’re when speaking in libertarian or academic circles. grateful to have you as a member. Please let us “Austrian” has become a noun! know what you think (via [email protected]), Our new moniker, The Austrian, goes to the heart and encourage your friends and family to join the and soul of what we are: an organization dedicated Mises Institute. nn to the brilliant scholarship of Austrian economics. Mises is our touchstone, Rothbard our animating Jeff Deist is President of the Mises Institute. 4 || January/February January/February 2015 2015 | The| The Austrian Austrian Lew Rockwell The Libertarian Principle of Secession or a century and a half, the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public. The government’s schools spin fairy tales about the “indivisible Union” and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed as unsophis- ticated and backward, while nationalism and centralization are made to seem progressive and Finevitable. When a smaller political unit wishes to withdraw from a larger one, its motives must be disrep- utable and base, while the motivations of the central power seeking to keep that unit in an arrangement it does not want are portrayed as selfless and patriotic, if they are considered at all. As usual, disinformation campaigns are meant to make potentially liberating ideas appear toxic and dangerous, and conveying the message that anyone who seeks acceptance and popularity ought to steer clear of whatever it is — in this case, secession — the regime has condemned. But when we set the propaganda aside, we discover that support for seces- sion means simply this: it is morally illegitimate to employ state violence against individuals who choose to group them- selves differently from how the existing regime chooses to group them. They prefer to live under a different jurisdiction. Libertarians consider it unacceptable to aggress against them for this. The libertarian principle of secession is not exactly embraced with enthusiasm by the people and institutions I call “regime libertarians.” Although these people tend to be located in and around the Beltway, regime libertarianism tran- scends geographical location, which is why I coined this special term to describe it. The Austrian | January/February 2015 | 5 The regime libertarian believes in the market econ- seems to support only those acts of secession that have omy, more or less. But talk about the Federal Reserve or the approval or connivance of the CIA. Austrian business cycle theory and he gets fidgety. His Mention secession, and the subject immediately turns institute would rather invite Janet Yellen for an exclusive to the southern Confederacy, whose moral enormities cocktail event than Ron Paul for a lecture. the regime libertarian proceeds to denounce, insinuat- He loves the idea of reform — whether it’s the Fed, ing that supporters of secession must be turning a blind the tax code, government schools, whatever. He flees eye to those enormities. But every libertarian worthy of from the idea of abolition. Why, that just isn’t respect- the name opposes any government’s support for slavery, able! He spends his time advocating this or that “tax centralization, conscription, taxation, or the suppres- reform” effort, instead of simply pushing for a lowering sion of speech and press. That goes without saying or repeal of existing taxes. It’s too tough to be a libertar- As Tom Woods has pointed out, the classical liberal, ian when it comes to antidiscrimination law, given how or libertarian, tradition of support for secession can much flak he’s liable to get, so he’ll side with left-liberals boast such luminaries as Alexis de Tocqueville, Rich- on that, even though it’s completely incompatible with ard Cobden, and Lord Acton, among many others. I’d his stated principles. like to add two more figures: in the nineteenth cen- tury, Lysander Spooner, and in the twentieth, Frank He is antiwar — sometimes, but certainly not as a gen- Chodorov. eral principle. He can be counted on to support the wars that have practically defined the American regime, and Spooner presents a real problem for the regime lib- which remain popular among the general public. He sups ertarians. Every libertarian acknowledges the greatness in happy concord with supporters of the most egregiously and importance of Spooner. The trouble is, he was an unjust wars, but his blood boils in moral outrage at some- avowed secessionist. one who told an off-color joke twenty-five years ago. Lysander Spooner was born in Massachusetts in I suppose you can guess where our regime libertarian January 1808, and would go on to become a lawyer, an stands on secession. Since the modern American regime entrepreneur, and a political theorist. He believed that emerged out of the violent suppression of the attempted true justice was not so much a matter of compliance with man-made law, but a refusal to engage in aggres- secession of eleven states, he, too, is an opponent of sion against peaceful individuals. His American Letter secession. If cornered, he may grudgingly endorse seces- Mail Company competed successfully against the US sion at a theoretical level, but in practice he generally Post Office, offering better service at lower prices, until the government forced him out of business in 1851. His work No Treason (1867), a collection of three essays, took the position that the Constitution, not having been agreed to by any living person and only ever expressly consented to by a small handful, cannot be binding on anyone.
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