Miyazaki’s Beautiful Antiwar Dreams

It is the last year of the Second World War. American bombers drop napalm canisters on Kobe, Japan, setting the picturesque city of wood, canvas, and paper alight. A young mother is caught in the conflagration, suffers greatly, then succumbs to her disfiguring burns. With the father fighting at sea, her adolescent son Seita must … Continue reading “Miyazaki’s Beautiful Antiwar Dreams”

From Primitive to Universal Plunder

In my essay “The Herd Mind,” I explained how “War is the health of the State,” according to Randolph Bourne: in particular, how war causes a country to regress from a diverse civilization to a uniform herd locked in fight-or-flight mode, and easily driven by the government. As I mentioned in my talk “How the … Continue reading “From Primitive to Universal Plunder”

How the Fed Feeds War

This talk was delivered April 10, 2015 at the Mises Institute’s “Sound Money: A Seminar for College and High School Students.” Also available in video on YouTube and audio on Soundcloud. You’ve been hearing a lot about sound money. Now I’m going to talk about unsound money: especially how it promotes war, and how governments love unsound … Continue reading “How the Fed Feeds War”

The Herd Mind

Randolph Bourne famously wrote, “War is the health of the State.” This has long been the byword for anti-war, anti-state libertarians, and rightly so. But Bourne did not mean exactly what most libertarians take this phrase to mean. To understand the maxim’s original meaning, as Bourne used it in his great unfinished essay “The State,” one … Continue reading “The Herd Mind”