Tweet [1]
My original plan was to include this link [2] in today’s Some Links [3]. I changed my mind. This contribution by my talented friend David Hart, of Liberty Fund, is so important that it deserves its own separate post [2]. Exactly 100 years ago the governments of Europe were just days away from declaring what we now call ‘World War I.’
Slaughtering people, including the innocent: now that’s an activity that governments perform with astonishing efficiency, dispatch, creativity, and cold-bloodedness. Governments are also pretty good at glorifying their murderous rampages. They build monuments to the genocides they commit and ‘teach’ school children how glorious and honorable those blood-soaked events were.
And capitalism, all the while, is falsely accused – especially by those who are inspired by centralized state power – of coarsening human existence. How bizarrely backwards.