In America's Great Depression (1963), Murray Rothbard shows how, contrary to the prevailing narrative, the prolonged and painful recession was a product of state intervention and artificial monetary expansion.

Karl Marx made four big predictions about the future of capitalism - and on each, history delivered the exact opposite . Marx predicted the disappearance of the middle class, with society polarising into a tiny group of capitalists and a massive, impoverished working class. Instead, the middle class exploded. Most people in developed nations today are middle class. He claimed the working class would become progressively poorer (“increasing immiseration”). But workers in capitalist countries instead became dramatically richer, with real wages, living standards, life expectancy and consumption all rising sharply. He believed capitalism would lead to ever-worsening crises and its own inevitable collapse. Capitalism, of course, has proven extraordinarily resilient, lifting billions out of poverty worldwide. He expected socialist revolution to break out first in the most advanced capitalist nations, specifically Britain, Germany and USA. Revolutions instead occurred in backward, agrarian societies like Russia, China, and Cuba. Marx got all this so wrong because he fundamentally misunderstood the dynamic and creative power of free markets. Far from impoverishing the masses, capitalism has produced the greatest rise in living standards in human history. The “proletariat” he wrote about now owns homes, cars, smartphones and enjoy vast improvements in health and education that previous generations could barely imagine. The empirical failure of Marx’s predictions is one of the most complete in intellectual history. But sadly, his ideas continue to influence politics and academia long after reality disproved them.

Gustave de Molinari was the original anarcho-capitalist. The pioneering economist is widely recognized as the first theorist of market anarchism and stands as a prominent figure in the French Liberal School alongside thinkers like Frédéric Bastiat. Born in Belgium in 1819, the French economist pushed classical liberal principles to their absolute logical conclusion: if the free market is the best mechanism for producing goods and services, it must also be the best mechanism for providing security, justice, and protection. In his groundbreaking 1849 essay, The Production of Security, Molinari challenged the foundational assumption that government holds a necessary monopoly on violence. He argued that the state operates as a coercive monopoly that inherently produces low-quality, overpriced protection. Instead, he proposed that sovereignty should belong to the individual, who should be free to buy protection from competing private insurance and security firms. He believed that competition in the marketplace would naturally incentivize these firms to resolve conflicts peacefully, efficiently, and affordably. While his radical anti-statism alienated many of his contemporary classical liberals - who favored a minimal "night-watchman" state - Molinari remained an influential voice for laissez-faire capitalism throughout his long life. He spent decades editing Le Journal des Économistes, a premier economic journal, where he fiercely defended free trade, peace, and individual liberty against rising tides of protectionism and socialism. Today, Molinari is celebrated as a visionary who bridged classical liberalism and modern libertarianism, laying the conceptual groundwork for subsequent, more famous thinkers like Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand.

True. Cavemen were busy 7 days a week trying to stay alive. Work has always been around. The challenge is producing more with less. Those who solve that challenge best can end up as billionaires.

One of the most pertinent sentences ever written about economics and politics is this, from Friedrich Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Hayek was not arguing against reason or planning in general. He was exposing the dangerous pretence of knowledge: the arrogant belief that experts and governments possess enough information to deliberately design and control complex social and economic systems. What we call the economy is the result of millions of individuals making decisions based on their own unique, local and constantly changing knowledge. Prices, traditions and social norms emerge as a spontaneous order that no central authority can replicate. When governments try to impose top-down designs - whether through industrial policy, price controls, wealth redistribution or social engineering - they inevitably fail because they lack the dispersed knowledge that only free individuals possess. This insight explains why central planning has repeatedly produced poverty and authoritarianism, while free societies have generated unprecedented prosperity. The planner’s fatal error is believing that society is like a machine that can be engineered, when in reality it is a complex, evolving order far beyond any single mind’s comprehension. Hayek’s message remains urgent today: humility is not just a virtue – it is an economic necessity. The more policymakers claim they can design the future, the more dangerous they become. It is the role of economics, properly understood, to expose them.

Socialism rewards power. When resource allocation, production, and distribution are centralised, power inevitably concentrate in the hand of those who control the central bureaucracy. Capitalism rewards value creation. To prosper, you must produce something that others are willing to forego alternative consumption to obtain.

The will continue to tell us that far right extremism is the real danger.

RT @MilesAMaxwell: And anarcho-captialism has the advantage of the opposite. The best and most productive rise to the top. They cannot get…

The West is losing the will to defend the civilisation it has inherited. This was the warning Christopher Hitchens spent the last years of his life trying to impress on an oblivious and negligent ruling class. And the danger he described was not an invading army but a cultural concession: the growing habit of treating free speech, the right to criticise religion and the refusal of sacred exemptions as negotiable. Islamist pressure for special protection, and the multicultural reluctance to resist it, were the clearest symptoms. Hitchens argued that once a society grants any creed the power to limit what may be said about it, the principle that protects every other liberty has already been compromised. He was particularly severe on the sections of the left that enabled the retreat. Anti-imperialism, he observed, had curdled into a reluctance to criticise any movement that defined itself against the West, even when that movement was theocratic and hostile to the freedoms the left professed. The result was selective silence - robust defence of expression when the target was Christian or secular, hesitation when the target was Islamist. Hitchens treated this not as nuance but as a betrayal of the universal claims the Enlightenment had made. Others had seen the pattern before Hitchens. Oswald Spengler had already noted how late liberal societies grow reluctant to exclude anything, elevating tolerance until they can no longer recognise a threat to their own forms of life. Carl Schmitt argued that the liberal dream of neutrality collapses once politics requires a distinction between friend and enemy; those who refuse to draw it simply allow others to draw it for them. Hitchens did not need their frameworks to see the same refusal at work. He watched governments and intellectuals treat the demand not to be offended as a higher duty than the duty to keep speech free, and he called the choice what it was: an internal surrender. Hitchens’s warning was straightforward. A culture that will not defend the conditions of its own criticism will eventually find those conditions removed. The loss is not forced from outside. It is permitted from within.