On February 12, 2009, Dr. Ron Paul (R-TX) delivered one of his most striking speeches on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Since referred to as the “What If…” speech, Paul’s remarks offer a precise distillation of the libertarian critique of U.S. foreign policy. At a time when military interventionism was still very much in vogue among Republican voters, Paul was willing to call a spade a spade and dismantle the faulty logic driving America’s misguided overseas adventures. Paul’s oratory is persuasive because he posits a series of hypotheticals that aren’t really hypotheticals....

In October 1945, George Orwell wrote an article titled “You and the Atom Bomb” for the socialist publication Tribune. Orwell’s piece makes a compelling argument against the atomic bomb, noting the myriad ways in which it maximizes state power and enables a handful of empires: "From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by...