Free Republic

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features two quotes combined into one. The authors are Ludwig von Mises & Vladimir Lenin. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. For the first time, I've decided to use two quotes in one Quotefall, by two different authors, to show the real connection between the controlling faction of the Democrat Party with its real nexus. Ludwig von Mises was an Austrian School economist, historian, and sociologist, who wrote and lectured extensively on classical liberalism, while Vladimir Lenin was a murderous, oppressive tyrant. All hints, along with the...

The University of Missouri has faced a tough few years. First, there were well-publicized protests stemming from student allegations that the administration responded inadequately to racial bias on campus. At one particularly charged demonstration, a (since fired) journalism professor called for “muscle” to prevent a student journalist from taking video of the protesters. This was followed by declining enrollment, budgetary shortfalls, the temporary shuttering of dorms, and staff layoffs from which the school has only started to recover. But Mizzou’s latest challenge comes in the form of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by Hillsdale College, a conservative institution in rural Michigan....

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...

David Bahnsen of Newport Beach, California is a Senior Vice President of Morgan Stanley, and also serves on the Board of Advisers of the California Recovery Project with Dr. Arthur Laffer. Bahnsen has abandoned his earlier support of the Ron Paul crusade, and now describes himself as an "economically literate Republican." He is the author of "The Undiscerning and Dangerous Appreciation of Ron Paul." Bahnsen says "It is the ironic that Ron Paul's alleged praiseworthiness comes from his devotion to the Constitution, when in fact, he has emphatically rejected it." Bahnsen has many family and business connections with libertarians. His...

Sarah Palin is one of the most intriguing (and polarizing) personalities to emerge on the national political stage in a long time. The way that many conservatives embrace her and many liberals vilify her illustrates in microcosm the yawning political divide in America today. We can draw insights about Palin's significance in America today from a trio of three markedly disparate historical figures: Ronald Reagan, the late Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and the Gospel of Matthew's King Herod. The connection between Sarah Palin and Ronald Reagan is fairly simple and straightforward. They share conservative convictions and a special gift...

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) is an iconic figure on the right, known as a great economist and a leading theoretician of free markets. (The surname is pronounced "MEE-zes" -- like "Moses" with a long "e" instead of "o." His books are often alphabetized under "v" because of the honorific title "von.") Unfortunately, Mises often is misunderstood. My purpose here is to correct some of these misapprehensions. After a decades-long career in his native Austria, Mises, a Jew, emigrated to escape Hitler. In the postwar years, Mises mentored four Ph.D.s in economics at New York University: Hans Sennholz, Louis Spadaro, Israel...

Mainstream economists dismiss the Austrians as cranks. Nobel economist Paul Samuelson wrote that "I tremble for the reputation of my subject" after reading the "exaggerated claims that used to be made in economics for the power of deduction and a priori reasoning [the Austrian methods]." (1) Noted economist Mark Blaug has called Austrian methodologies "so cranky and idiosyncratic that we can only wonder that they have been taken seriously by anyone Perhaps the defining difference between mainstream and Austrian economists lies in their opposing philosophies towards learning truth. Mainstream scientists use a well-developed process called the scientific method. This method...

"WILL CAPITALISM SURVIVE?" was the question before the lunch table Wednesday. "It hasn't been tried," I replied, "at least not since the McKinley administration and certainly not since 1914," when the Federal Reserve started operations in earnest. In doing my conservative curmudgeon act, I probably came across as supercilious. But my response also reflected my reaction to the smug contempt toward free-market philosophy in general and Ronald Reagan and his lesser successors in particular expressed elsewhere in the press of late. The credit crisis and the ensuing global economic contraction have failed to make an impression on academe, where free-market...

Barack Obama is already making the Clinton and Bush years seem like the good old days. Close to a trillion dollars are being tossed around in a “stimulus” package that no one in his right mind—and I do not here include the mainstream of the economics profession, which has disgraced itself in this crisis—expects to bring about recovery. Economist Robert Wenzel rightly describes the stimulus as “just the insiders raiding the till while there is still money in it.” Trillions of dollars are likewise being thrown at financial institutions that (if we actually believe in the free market) richly deserve...

Learning From Conservative History: Main Trails . . . and Less-Traveled Paths - 01/02/09 This is part three of a symposium on contemporary conservatism hosted by ISI at Yale in November, 2008. Read part one. Read part two.By training, I am an historian. I love the discipline and believe that historical mindedness—the ability to see and understand the grounding of current institutions, issues, and events in the complex matrix of the past—this is the superior way to make sense of reality.All the same, I have been troubled for over a decade by the growing interest of American conservatives in...

It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether the cause of individual liberty is lost. Shortly after the financial crisis hit, Jacob Weisberg, editor in chief of the online magazine Slate, wrote an article with the headline “Libertarianism is dead.” The burden of the piece was that, since deregulation and untrammeled free markets have been so thoroughly discredited by this crisis, libertarians should just crawl in their holes and never be heard from again. And the attitude that this crisis means what we really need is more regulation and a retreat from the “theology” of free markets was heard on...

Red Sky at Morning by: Malcolm A. Kline, November 07, 2008 An argument could be made that this past presidential election, like so many others that did not involve Ronald Reagan, was not so much a choice between a liberal and a conservative as much as what authors such as Jonah Goldberg and my predecessor at Accuracy in Academia Dan Flynn might term a contest between feminine and masculine progressives. Accordingly, we have to dig into the past to see how we came to this impasse. “Man is not a being that, on the one hand, has an economic side...

If you are a critic of the Bush administration, chances are that, at some point over the past six months, Ron Paul has said something that appealed to you. Paul describes himself as a libertarian, but, since his presidential campaign took off earlier this year, the Republican congressman has attracted donations and plaudits from across the ideological spectrum. Antiwar conservatives, disaffected centrists, even young liberal activists have all flocked to Paul, hailing him as a throwback to an earlier age, when politicians were less mealy-mouthed and American government was more modest in its ambitions, both at home and abroad. In...

The name of the eminent Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises does not commonly arise in feminist circles which tend to view the free market as an institution through which men as a class oppress women as a class. If the subject of Mises ever did arise, the political incorrectness of his observations on female nature would be likely to create more, not less, coldness. For example, in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, he wrote, "It may be that a woman is able to choose between renouncing either the most profound womanly joy, the joy of motherhood, or the more...

One of the chilling facts about the 20th century West is how poorly champions of individual liberty have fared in free societies. They seldom receive state honors. Rarely are they celebrated in academia or the media. One of the 20th century's great economists, Ludwig von Mises, a refugee from Hitler, could not get a university appointment in America. Mises said that government was the problem, not the solution -- and outraged progressives, who were committed to the welfare state, ostracized him. F.A. Hayek was disparaged for many years for his warnings against big government, as was Milton Friedman. In the...