Friday, October 10, 2008

The End of the World As We Know It? (Lew Rockwell)

Lew Rockwell continues:

"And I feel fine." Well, not quite. The pleasures of saying "I told you so" have always been overrated, but they're non-existent these days as the parasite politicians and central bankers, and their willing enablers, non-Misesian economists, wreck the world. Then they use the wreckage as the excuse for vaster inflationism, fascism, and socialism.

But in the maelstrom, we have a job, aside from protecting ourselves and our families to the best of our abilities. That job is to teach discover and teach the truth about freedom and about the crimes and consequences of the state, the empire, central banking, and paper money. The truth is the necessary foundation of the restoration.

What Mises wrote seems ever more prescient:

No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result.

In 1940, he was leaving Geneva, leaving a war-torn Europe for a centrally planned United States. Disaster was everywhere and there was far less hope to be had than today. He wrote:

How one carries on in the face of unavoidable catastrophe is a matter of temperament. In high school, as was custom, I had chosen a verse by Virgil to be my motto: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito. Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it. I recalled these words during the darkest hours of the war. Again and again I had met with situations from which rational deliberation found no means of escape; but then the unexpected intervened, and with it came salvation. I would not lose courage even now. I wanted to do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in saying what I knew to be true.

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