Comments on: Freedom, Naturally: A Review of Morris and Linda Tannehill’s The Market for Liberty

By: Allen Weingarten

Allen Weingarten — Fri, 27 May 2011 15:17:17 +0000

True. Also, people in the USSR understood that they were receiving propaganda, while in America the public thinks they are getting a balanced view when they learn about the virtues of government.

By: Inquisitor

Inquisitor — Fri, 27 May 2011 13:44:10 +0000

It’s easier for non-totalitarian governments to mask the fact that people would be better off without them due to the twinned operation of a market economy by their side, dulling their own inherent inefficiencies.

By: Allen Weingarten

Allen Weingarten — Fri, 27 May 2011 07:39:38 +0000

I grant that governments are often so destructive, that people would be better off, with none at all. Here I include those of fascist Germany, and communist Russia. Other examples include communist China (which successfully carried out the starvation of tens of millions of its people) and Islamic governments (with their totalitarian forms of Shariah law). Yet I cannot view the founding of America, with the ideals of its Declaration of Independence, and its structure of law under the Constitution, in that light, and say it would have been better had there been no government, thereby allowing England to dominate the colonists. Moreover, it is disconcerting, given the competition between the horrific governments, and the less culpable non-totalitarian governments, that anarchists tend to attack the latter more than the former. It has been such thinking that led the otherwise cogent Murray Rothbard to support the murderous Black Panthers, because they were opposed to our government.