Albert Jay Nock: Perhaps the most brilliant American essayist of the 20th century, and certainly among its most important libertarian thinkers

DOWNLOAD Memoirs of a Superfluous Man - MISES INSTITUTE

Albert Jay Nock, perhaps the most brilliant American essayist of the 20th century, and certainly among its most important libertarian thinkers, set out to write his autobiography but he ended up doing much more. He presents here a full theory of society, state, economy, and culture, and does so almost inadvertently.

His stories, lessons, observations, and conclusions pack a very powerful punch, so much so that anyone who takes time to read carefully cannot but end up changed in intellectual outlook. One feels that one has been let in a private club of people who see more deeply than others. This is truly an American classic.

He said what?!?

This is war!

The sooner we face facts and respond accordingly, the sooner we will truly and effectively fight for liberty.

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Now for the bad news

"The worst" always rise to the top of the political heap under a regime of government planning, Hayek explained, for they are the ones with the least qualms about brutalizing their fellow citizens and depriving them of their liberties. All of this can only be sustained by what Hayek called "The End of Truth," or the effects of massive government propaganda that demonizes the civil society, individualism, and the system of peaceful voluntary exchange and private property (capitalism), while glorifying all aspects of the state.

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Now for the bad news:

U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans

The obsession with Jefferson is highly political

If you occasionally run into liberal idiots who claim that Tea Party members want to back to the time when women couldn't vote or back to the time of slavery, you need to check this out.

Legal Insurrection: Jefferson is a proxy target in the modern political war

Andrew Klavan: The Long Game

Brilliant: Three areas the Right should address, financially and intellectually...

This AND MORE from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

The American Patriot Defined

PATRIOT POST

ECON 101

HotAir.com: Video: Four reasons why big government hurts the economy

Thomas Paine: "That government which governs least, governs best."

Regulations: That phrase is uttered like an incantation, the magical answer...

...there is nothing simplistic about proposing the market as a solution to an economic problem. It’s short way of saying: let the multitude of knowledgeable people seeking profit, risking their own money, and responding to incentives find a solution based on persuasion not force. Translated that way, it sounds like a promising approach.

Ironically, those who don’t appreciate markets are in fact the ones who offer a simplistic, even empty alleged solution to economic problems: government regulation. That phrase is uttered like an incantation, the magical answer to all doubts about how, in the absence of fully free markets, problems would be solved. The irony is that while “let the market handle it” can be unpacked and made specific, “regulation” cannot. It can only be interpreted this way: Appoint a czar or a committee to somehow watch over things, and all will be well.

We’re hearing this idea a lot these days...

The Pretense of Regulatory Knowledge

Virtuoso of Joy

While Obama sashays around the world putting America down, this man endured years of torture to avoid doing just that:

For 25 months in such infamous Japanese POW camps as Ofuna, Omori and Naoetsu, Mr. Zamperini was physically tortured and subjected to constant psychological abuse. He was beaten. He was starved. He was denied medical care for maladies that included beriberi and chronic bloody diarrhea. His fellow prisoners—among them Mr. Phillips—were treated almost as badly. But Mr. Zamperini was singled out by a sadistic guard named Mutsuhiro Watanabe, known to prisoners as "the Bird," a handle picked because it had no negative connotations that might bring down his irrational wrath. The Bird intended to make an example of the famous Olympian. He regularly whipped him across the face with a belt buckle and forced him to perform demeaning acts, among them push-ups atop pits of human excrement. The Bird's goal was to force Mr. Zamperini to broadcast anti-American propaganda over the radio.

This story starkly illuminates the difference between the Far Left hate-America crowd and the Tea Party (a symbol of the opposite) and those who gave their all to defend our liberty.

In her new book, the author of 'Seabiscuit' turns to the unimaginable ordeal of an Olympic athlete and WW II hero. Because of her own debilitating illness, they struck a special bond...

The Defiant Ones

We will either get liberty or totalitarianism...

There is no middle ground.

You know what to do...

Welcome to the Free Lunch Club

Politicians thrive on using other people’s money and promising free lunches. The growth of government has politicized life and weakened the nation’s moral fabric. Government intervention—in the economy, the community, and society—has increased the payoff from political action and reduced the scope of private action. People have become more dependent on the State and have sacrificed freedom for a false sense of security...

The Rise of Government and the Decline of Morality

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation?

Nowhere.

Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?

First private lawsuit against ObamaCare filed in Mississippi on Good Friday!

Liberty in Action

Keep hope alive...

Note: This is the first day of a vacation at Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs. We first discovered this place when we watched the Robert Altman movie where it was featured in a scene where Tim Robbins and his date escaped Hollywood to dine on the patio while a beautiful couple slipped, naked, into the natural Hot Spring grotto...



We've been coming ever since :-)

(My husband just asked, in horror: "Are you BLOGGING???"

I asked him how he knew that I was and he said he heard me typing...I asked: "So is it against the law to type now???"

And so it goes :)

William Prescott: 2/20/1726

A Revolutionary War Colonel, he built the fortifications at Breed's Hill and commanded the militia at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. He fought in the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. His name was William Prescott, born FEBRUARY 20, 1726.

After the Boston Tea Party, where colonists threw 342 chests of British East India tea overboard, Parliament passed the Boston Port Bill, blockading the harbor and starving the inhabitants. The Committee of Correspondence sent word to the other Colonies, who called a Day of Fasting and Prayer, June 1, 1774, "to seek divine direction and aid."

In August of 1774, William Prescott led the men of Pepperell, Massachusetts, to deliver loads of rye to Boston's inhabitants, telling them: "We heartily sympathize with you, and are always ready to do all in our power for your support, comfort and relief, knowing that Providence has placed you where you must stand the first shock."

William Prescott continued: "We consider that we are all embarked in (the same boat) and must sink or swim together. Let us all be of one heart, and stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. And may He, of His infinite mercy, grant us deliverance of all our troubles."

American Minute with Bill Federer

LIBERTY TRUMPS TYRANNY!!!

GREAT SCOTT!!!!!

The SCOTT HEARD ROUND THE WORLD!!!!!

The Citizen's Constitution

Seth Lipsky's new book, The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guideprovides a running commentary on the Constitution, sentence by sentence, and often clause by clause, or word by word, in a highly readable fashion, infusing every provision of the document with color and background, and highlighting its meaning in an era of big government and shrinking freedoms.

The Citizen's Constitution makes the case that Americans' age-old rights and privileges are more critical - and more in need of understanding and defending - than ever before in our history. It is a book that is both erudite and entertaining, and could not be more relevant to current events.

...and don't forget about this:

"...some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or—much more mysteriously—to submit to it...Anyone who thinks the totalitarian temptation lies buried in Lenin's mausoleum would do well to read this book..."

Blog of the Day

Conservatives often wonder why the heck a bunch of people in the freest country that ever existed on this planet just can't wait to take on the great burden of an ever-growing bureaucracy that will monitor and dictate their every bodily function, their mobility, their choices, and their freedom.

Amazingly, a Frenchman figured it all out!

"Last Exit to Utopia" was first published in France nearly a decade ago. It concerns itself primarily with the failure of much of the French left to come to grips with the collapse of communism and the exposure of its innumerable crimes. The events and debates under its review date mainly to the 1990s, and its author died in 2006.

Yet the book, at last available in English in this fine translation, ought to command close attention because it was written by Jean-François Revel, who—unlike such bien-pensant idols as Jean-Paul Sartre (an admirer of Stalin) and Michel Foucault (a cheerleader of the Ayatollah Khomeini)—deserves to be ranked as the pre-eminent French political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. What's more, the book's themes continue to resonate today, when murderous ideologies still compete for legitimacy and "enlightened" understanding by the Western intelligentsia.

Revel's great subject was totalitarianism, not just its practice but also its intellectual methods, deceits and disturbing psychological attractions. In books such as The Totalitarian Temptation (1976) and How Democracies Perish
(1983), he dissected the mind-set of Western intellectuals who, living in democracies, found much to admire in gulag countries like the Soviet Union and Cuba and much to detest in free ones—the U.S. most of all.

So...you'd think that the collapse of the Soviet Union woulda put an end to all that bullshit...BUT NO (as the late John Belushi of Saturday Night Live used to say)!

The tipping point, in Revel's view, was the publication in 1997 of "The Black Book of Communism," an 800-page compendium of the serial barbarities of communist regimes from China and Ethiopia to Russia and Cambodia. This massive scholarly undertaking, meticulous in its research and incontrovertible in its findings, was instantly greeted with fury by much of the French intelligentsia, which refused to accept that its own eyes-wide-shut apologetics for the likes of Mao, Mengistu, Stalin and Pol Pot were no less a form of complicity in mass murder than Holocaust denial.

Karl Marx gives us a hint of at least some part of the attraction to the brutality of totalitarianism:

"What is the worldly religion of the Jew?" Marx asked. "Huckstering. What is his God? Money." Communism, according to its founding father, "would make the Jew impossible."

And, like the race hustlers who'd be out of a job if they ever acceded to the end of racism in America,

"Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not." --Jean-François Revel

Ravel has also given us a great gift--a clue to our own situation today in dealing with the radical savages who have a blind dedication to the "excommunication of modernity":

Revel's analysis helps to make sense of the latest version of the totalitarian temptation, this time the temptation of radical Islam...

...but you'll have to read the whole book review in order to get this, the new modern mystery of our time.

The Siren Call Of Tyranny
The hard-left former groupies of totalitarianism keep searching for new murderous ideologies to defend.

Another book to consider:

Read Mark Levin's new Epilogue for Liberty & Tyranny

Read the NEW EPILOGUE!