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Sacrificing Liberty for Safety

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Neither Liberty Nor Safety by Robert Higgs (Independent Institute, 2007); 202 pages. Many readers will immediately recognize that the title of this book comes from one of Benjamin Franklin’s many political insights: “Those who would sacrifice essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Author Robert Higgs agrees with Franklin’s judgment, but the point of his powerful and iconoclastic book is that when people turn to the state crying for safety, they will end up sacrificing their liberty in vain. They will get neither liberty nor safety. The modern state takes people’s liberty (as well as a lot of their property) but delivers to them increased insecurity. It’s a great trick — a con job of monumental proportions. Politicians promise the people safety from everything from vicious terrorists to the rapacious greed of capitalists. The trouble is that the one tool ...

“Red-Lining” in Cuba and Georgia

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In my August 19 blog, I pointed out how President Bush knowingly and intentionally ignored Russian President Putin’s warning that pushing to admit Georgia into NATO would cross Russian “red lines.” At the urging of the U.S. government, NATO, whose original mission was to defend against a Soviet attack, has already admitted many Soviet-bloc countries as members. U.S. officials have also been pushing for the installation of missile batteries in former Eastern-bloc countries. The U.S. position, and that of U.S. neo-conservatives, is that the Russians have nothing to be concerned about. The United States is a peaceful, law-abiding country, the argument goes, whose foreign policy is not based on pressure, aggression, and regime change. The Russians are simply suffering a case of paranoia over the NATO encirclement of Russia and the installation of U.S. missile batteries along Russian borders. Previously, in my August 13 blog, I posited a hypothetical situation in which Russia entered into an agreement with Cuba to ...

Home-Made Crises

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Yesterday, I wrote about how U.S. foreign policy ignites and engenders a variety of crises, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Such crises are then used to get the citizenry all worked up and panic-stricken, which then enables the government to increase its power over the citizenry. The current crises dealing with the resurgence of the “communist” threat from Russia and the “terrorist” threat from the Muslims, along with the potential threat from the international drug dealers as a result of the war on drugs, provide good examples of how government policies produce the crises which are then used as the excuse to expand the power of the government. For example, consider the new “crisis” concerning Russia that America is now facing and over which the neo-con community is now going ballistic. An article in last Sunday’s New ...