Since there are numerous mentions of the anniversary of the Berlin wall I thought I’d share my experiences. In 1961 I was an exchange student in Paris and decided to go to see the wall for myself. (Berlin in December was the coldest I have ever been.)

Passing through Checkpoint Charlie I entered Communist territory for the first time. It was as I’d expected: the universal hopeless shabbiness of the city and the people. I spoke with as many as I could. No one criticized the regime, of course. One old man said, gratefully, “Sie geben uns alles was wir brauchen.” (They give us everything we need.) I maliciously asked another man where THEIR Kurfürstendamm, the Fifth Avenue of West Berlin, was. He replied, abashed, “Well, we don’t have anything EXACTLY like that.”

I visited a few bookstores, noting the endless shelves of works by Marx, Lenin, and the then East German leader, Ulbricht. I was hoping that they might have Mises’s Socialism, misled by the title, but they weren’t fools—they knew their enemy. I had a crummy lunch at one of their elite restaurants, and decided to go back. Still on East German soil I encountered a soldier.

Idiot that I was—I could have been detained for trying to subvert their military—I looked him in the face and said, “Komm mit.” (Come along.) He replied, “Kann nicht.” (I can’t.) I sauntered back past Checkpoint Charlie, feeling a burden lifting from my shoulders, and went home.

Churchill was from first to last a Man of the State, of the welfare state and of the warfare state. War, of course, was his lifelong passion; and, as an admiring historian has written: “Among his other claims to fame, Winston Churchill ranks as one of the founders of the welfare state.” Thus, while Churchill never had a principle he did not in the end betray, this does not mean that there was no slant to his actions, no systematic bias. There was, and that bias was towards lowering the barriers to state power. FULL ARTICLE

The Independent Review has made my article on this topic available here.

I’m would like to add my voice to the celebration over the publication of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism.

It is a magnificent work of scholarship, not only definitive on Mises’s life and works, but also brilliantly delineating the Vienna of the time, the development of the Austrian school, the place of other thinkers like Hayek, and Mises’s contributions to American and world libertarianism.

I’ll be picking up a copy of Guido’s book at the conference of the Mises Institute in New York, in October. With luck, I’ll be able to get Guido to autograph it for me.

News item: “Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.”

To have known the great Mises creates in one’s mind life-long standards of what an ideal intellectual should be, writes Ralph Raico. Decade after decade he fought militarism, protectionism, inflationism, every variety of socialism, and every policy of the interventionist state, and through most of that time he stood alone, or close to it. The totality and enduring intensity of Mises’s battle could only be fueled from a profound inner sense of the truth and supreme value of the ideas for which he was struggling. FULL ARTICLE

More troubling news from the regime that we were so assured would bring all good things to Ukraine. So that’s 3 for 3: corruption, Socialism , bankruptcy.

For a thousand years before Hitler, Germany was an integral part of western civilization. There has been a growth of interest also in German liberalism. This tradition was unduly neglected for decades, especially after what was seen as its ignominious defeat in the later Imperial period. German liberalism was never the equal of, for instance, French liberal thought. Yet upon examination, the political and even intellectual contributions of German authentic liberalism are evident. [Full Article]

These are boom times for histories of World War I. Like its sequel, though to a lesser degree, it seems to be the war that never ends. Works keep appearing on issues once considered settled, such as the “Belgian atrocities” and the reputation of commanders like Douglas Haig. Last year, Cambridge published a collection of 500-plus pages on one of the most exhaustively examined subjects in the whole history of historical writing, the origins of the First World War. As for general works, in the past few years at least six have appeared in English, by both academic and popular historians. The Western Front: Battle Ground and Home Front in the First World War (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003) by Hunt Tooley, who teaches at Austin College, in Texas, falls into the academic category, and for such a short volume (305 pages) it offers a very great deal indeed. [Full Article on LRC]

From my 1980 article, which seems oddly relevant today: “Libertarians are not ‘against’ tradition. But we make certain elementary distinctions. It is time conservatives like van den Haag began doing likewise – starting with the distinction between the traditions that mankind has voluntarily generated and preserved, and those stemming from coercion, violence, and force. And it is time they stopped talking as if all the good and great traditions that are our rightful inheritance were somehow to be credited to the state, and to themselves as the state’s apologists, rather than to their true source – the women and men who, with what freedom they had, created, sifted, refined, and transmitted those traditions through the generations.” [full article]

The Second World War has been called the war that never ends. To a lesser degree, the same could be said of the First World War. It has been estimated, for instance, that the Yale library has 34,000 titles on that conflict published before 1977 and more than 5,000 since. What I propose to do in this all too brief is article to survey a few recent works. [MORE]