“Four men and one woman,” Doherty writes, “four Jews and one Catholic; four economists and one novelist; four minarchists … and one anarchist … two native-born Americans and three immigrants; two Nobel Prize winners and three who remained not only aloof from most professional and intellectual accolades but generated a heated hostility from cultural gatekeepers.” Doherty makes no mention of it, but there’s yet another facile point of comparison he might have used in discussing his five major figures — their longevity. For of his five major figures, three (Mises, Hayek, and Friedman) lived into their 90s. The other two — Rand and Rothbard — never made it to 80. Rothbard never made it to 70. It’s almost as though radicalism makes you die young. Mises, Hayek, and Friedman were minarchists — classical liberals, to be more precise.

JB:  To read the rest of the article posted byB.K. Marcus, or to listen to audio podcast by Mr. Riggenbach, go to the mises.org website, the best site in the world!

Classical liberal ideas apply between states as well as within states, explains Edwin van de Haar

Questions of war and peace, or foreign policy in general, are among the most dramatic issues in politics. It is no wonder that classical liberal think tanks publish papers and articles on international affairs. Often these are reactions to current issues. They hardly ever clarify how their points of view relate to classical liberalism as a political philosophy. This begs the question: Does a classical liberal approach to international relations exist?

This article will argue in the affirmative, that it is possible to judge current foreign policy standpoints from a classical liberal perspective and to develop a classical liberal foreign policy agenda. Based on a study of four important classical liberal thinkers, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek, it will show that classical liberalism is applicable in international as well as domestic politics.(1)

Academic international relations theory is dominated by American-style liberalism, which has much in common with European and Australian social democracy. One effect of this is the equation of liberalism with Immanuel Kant and Woodrow Wilson inspired calls for a world federation of the brotherhood of man, cosmopolitanism, a belief in the goodness of people and the possibility of abolishing war, optimism about the peace-enhancing outcomes of increased intergovernmental international organisation, international free trade, and so forth.(2)

Classical liberals often disagree on its precise definition, but most regard classical liberalism as the political theory characterised by a firm belief in individualism, negative freedom, non-religious natural law, spontaneous order, a limited state, and the rule of law.(3) In this article these ideas will be briefly introduced and then applied to international relations, thus sketching the contours of a classical liberal approach to world politics. In the process it will become clear that liberalism in the American sense differs substantially from classical liberalism.

JB:  You can read the rest of the article at the Policy magazine website. Policy is amagazine published in Austalia and New Zealand, and is sponsored by theThe Centre for Independent Studies, Australasia’s leading independent public policy research institute or ‘think-tank’.

Ummmm, it seems this entry turned out to be about politics after all.  Yeah, about the Raven thing…for the first time in sixty years, the annual anonymous birthday visitor to Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, who deposited three roses and a bottle of Cognac at the tombstone, did not make the pilgrimage last night.  That is about the same time the last non-socialist was elected to statewide office in the Bay State.  Maybe he/she was a resident of Massachusetts.  Some things are more important than others, quoth the raven.

JB