TGIF: “America First” Need Not Be Antiwar

TGIF: “America First” Need Not Be Antiwar

by | Jun 30, 2023 | , , , ,

Today's Trump-inspired "America First" faction cannot be counted on to be consistently noninterventionist and antiwar. That it may lean that way because its chief rival faction is so enthusiastic about foreign adventurism is hardly a firm assurance that it will remain antiwar in the future. We must beware of the assumption that an interventionist foreign policy is, in contrast to America First, by nature "Any Country But America First." Admittedly, advocates of U.S. foreign adventurism often defend their policy choices in terms of the benefits to another population. But that's not all they...

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TGIF: Foreign Policy Matters

TGIF: Foreign Policy Matters

by | Jun 23, 2023 | , , , , , ,

In an extra special way, foreign policy matters crucially to champions of individual liberty. Not that it doesn't matter to other people too -- just not in all the same ways. Anyone who understands the importance of keeping government power strictly limited in domestic matters (if such power must exist at all) will also grasp the paramount importance of constraining government power abroad. They're cut from the same cloth. This is obvious to libertarians, but not necessarily to others. When Randolph Bourne wrote that "war is the health of the state," he expected his readers to understand...

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TGIF: Markets Clean Up

TGIF: Markets Clean Up

by | Jun 16, 2023 | , , , ,

Donald Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, has been a great defender of individual liberty for a long time. One of his favorite projects is pointing out how innovative and usually unnewsworthy market activity, to the extent that government keeps out of the way, increasingly helps us to live in cleaner, healthier surroundings. In other words, if "the environment" matters for human well-being -- and it certainly does -- the freer that markets are, that is, the freer that we are, the better for everyone. Freedom and the wealth it generates on net make our world...

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TGIF: Condemning Tyranny Abroad and War

TGIF: Condemning Tyranny Abroad and War

by | Jun 9, 2023 | , , , , ,

Can foreign-policy noninterventionists publicly criticize foreign tyrannies without giving credence to the war party? Yes -- if they try. At least I hope so. Being a noninterventionist does not require agnosticism about, much less approval of, despotic regimes. U.S. war, of course, threatens the liberty and lives of Americans, not to mention foreigners. That's why Randolph Bourne wrote, "War is the health of the state." When private individuals condemn tyranny abroad and U.S. war against it, they are pursuing the same cause. That many people who denounce tyranny in Russia, China, and...

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TGIF: Immigration and Liberty

TGIF: Immigration and Liberty

by | Jun 2, 2023 | , , , , , , ,

Forbidding freedom of movement to aspiring migrants strikes at the liberty not only of those individuals but also of citizens and legal residents of the United States. That's the way it is with immigration. Indeed, that's the way it is with freedom. The government can't violate the freedom of some peaceful people without also violating the freedom of others. Ilya Somin, who teaches law at George Mason University and is a constitutional scholar with the Cato Institute, makes this point in "Three Constitutional Issues Libertarians Should Make Their Own." (The other two issues his title refers...

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TGIF: The Knowledge that Only Free Markets Disclose

TGIF: The Knowledge that Only Free Markets Disclose

by | May 26, 2023 | , , , ,

As a follow-up to my recent article about F. A. Hayek's classic article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), I thought it worth extending Hayek's exploration of this area of social theory. In 1968 the Nobel laureate-economist delivered a lecture in German known in English as "Competition as a Discovery Procedure." It's an alluring title, and anyone concerned with what makes for a good and prosperous society should be familiar with Hayek's basic point. Hayek gets right to it. He notes that standard macroeconomists are guilty of having "investigated competition primarily under assumptions...

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TGIF: No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy

TGIF: No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy

by | May 19, 2023 | , , , , , ,

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says "no one has a right to immigrate" to the United States. "We determine as Americans," he says, "what type of immigration system benefits our country. When you're doing immigration, it's not for their benefit as foreigners. It's for your benefit as Americans. So if there's legal immigration that's harming America, we shouldn't do that either." I'd turn that around and say that no one, including a state legislature, has a right to forbid or restrict immigration, the peaceful movement of individuals from outside to inside America. That doesn't mean that landowners...

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TGIF: Ducking Hayek

TGIF: Ducking Hayek

by | May 12, 2023 | , , , , , ,

May 8 marked the 124th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel-winning economist of the Austrian school. (He died in 1992.) That makes it a good time to acknowledge one of his many contributions, his epistemic case for the free and competitive market order. It's well-suited to the information age. One of Hayek's best-known articles was published in 1945 in the American Economic Review: "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (reprinted in Individualism and Economic Order). He got right to the point: What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic...

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