Murray Rothbard Quote of the Day!

This one's golden:

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

Rothbard quote of the Day!

This one is golden.  Every once in a while I stop and reflect on this quote, and as to how it relates to my own life and decisions:

"Any man who is an individualist and a libertarian in this day and age has a difficult row to hoe. He finds himself in a world marked, if not dominated, by folly, fraud, and tyranny. He has, if he is a reflecting man, three possible courses of action open to him: (1) he may retire from the social and political world into his private occupation; (2) he can set about to try to change the world for the better, or at least to formulate and propagate his views with such an ultimate hope in mind; or, (3) he can stay in the world, enjoying himself immensely at this spectacle of folly. To take this third route requires a special type of personality with a special type of judgment about the world. He must, on the one hand, be an individualist with a serene and unquenchable sense of self-confidence; he must be supremely "inner-directed" with no inner shame or quaking at going against the judgment of the herd. He must, secondly, have a supreme zest for enjoying life and the spectacle it affords; he must be an individualist who cares deeply about liberty and individual excellence, but who can—from that same dedication to truth and liberty—enjoy and lampoon a society that has turned its back on the best that it can achieve. And he must, thirdly, be deeply pessimistic about any possibility of changing and reforming the ideas and actions of the vast majority of his fellow-men. He must believe that boobus Americanus is doomed to be boobus Americanus forevermore."

Murray Rothbard rocks!

Rothbard Quote of the Day!

"The widespread attack on technology is even more irresponsible. If technology were to be rolled back to the “tribe” and to the preindustrial era, the result would be mass starvation and death on a universal scale. The vast majority of the world’s population is dependent for its very survival on modern technology and industry. The North American continent was able to accommodate approximately one million Indians in the days before Columbus, all living on a subsistence level. It is now able to accommodate several hundred million people, all living at an infinitely higher living standard—and the reason is modern technology and industry. Abolish the latter and we will abolish the people as well. For all one knows, to our fanatical antipopulationists this “solution” to the population question may be a good thing, but for the great majority of us, this would be a draconian “final solution” indeed."

Guerrilla Warfare - the Libertarian Way to Fight

I was skipping around in my reading today, and found a cool passage in Conceived in Liberty on the libertarian way to wage a war.  Murray Rothbard writes:

A guerrilla war would be the libertarian way to fight a war fully consistent with the American revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality of rights, and, therefore, the only way to achieve the libertarian goals of the Revolution. A European-style, orthodox war would be heavily statist, and would inevitably lead to the resumption of the very statism—the taxes, the restrictions, the bureaucracy—which the colonists were waging the revolution to escape.

What is more, guerrilla war would be enormously more effective; for that is the way any subjugated people—not only libertarians—can best fight against a better-armed, but hated foe. The efficiency of guerrilla fighting as against European warfare had not only been demonstrated in the unbroken victories of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys in the Vermont revolution, but also in the victory at Concord, a guerrilla engagement so individualistic as to be almost completely leaderless. In contrast stood the slaughter at Lexington, where the Americans had fought in fixed ranks in the open.

Both moral principle and utility therefore required the choice of a guerrilla war; but various factors, certainly including the novelty of the dilemma, dictated a different choice.