We Win the NY Times Prize

The New York Times, whistling past the financial graveyard, paused over the weekend to smear the Mises Institute, Ron Paul, our other scholars, hardcore libertarianism, and me. Why? Because our ideas and our youth movement are gaining real traction. It is in effect a compliment. They have never faced opposition like ours before, and Ron Pauls tremendous resonance with young people has only made things worse from the Timess point of view.

The Times wants opponents who play the game, who accept the presuppositions of the regime, and who are willing to confine themselves to the narrow range of debate to which the Times would prefer to confine the American people.

The purpose of articles like the one over the weekend, it should be unnecessary to point out, is not to shed light. It is to demonize and destroy a school of thought that the regime considers threatening.

The article, for instance, notes that Ron spoke on the topic Do We Live in a Police State? earlier this month at a Mises Institute event, and that another speaker (me) spoke on American Fascism. The lecture titles are evidently supposed to be self-refuting, although you can listen to Rons remarks and read mine and decide for yourself. Its little wonder that the Times would want to ridicule the idea that American society could resemble a police state, given that papers cover-ups of the regimes surveillance of American citizens.

The rest of the article is an attempt to distort the philosophy of libertarianism and to demonize Ron and other prominent exponents of that philosophy.

The whole exercise reminds me of the time, not long ago, in which a state-endorsed hate group took a swipe at Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), known in his day as Mr. Libertarian. The writer summarized Murrays career in a single sentence about of all things lesbians during the Progressive Era.

Now consider: Rothbards 1,000-page treatise Man, Economy, and State was an extraordinary contribution to the field of economics; his two-volume history of economic thought has been praised by scholars across the board; his study of the Panic of 1819, published by Columbia University Press, received rave reviews in the scholarly journals and is still considered definitive; his Ethics of Liberty is a philosophical defense of self-ownership and the nonaggression principle, and so on.

And so on hardly does Rothbard justice: we havent mentioned his textbook on money and banking, his classic What Has Government Done to Our Money?, his four-volume history of colonial America, the scholarly journals he edited, the voluminous correspondence he kept up with the major thinkers of his day, and well, and so on.

And a critic tried to reduce this man this man! to one unfavorable sentence.

It used to be easy to do this: how, apart from driving to the library, was someone to discover Rothbard for himself? But today, discovering Rothbard is just a click away. And once you discover him his scholarship, his knowledge, the encouragement he gave to students, and his refusal to compromise his principles even when doing so would have meant career advancement you understand why the state wants to minimize or demonize him. No wonder the most popular piece of libertarian apparel is our Rothbard Enemy of the State T-shirt.

Continue reading here:
We Win the NY Times Prize