The Hot Air Machine

  IN political science there is a concept known as “Conquest’s laws of politics.” It is named after Robert Conquest, a conservative British historian best known for his books on the Soviet Union . Similar to Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” Conquest’s laws define three principles of political action that can be considered reliably accurate. These three laws are: Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. All these laws have interesting implications and can be looked at one by one. However, today the one law that I want us to focus on in particular is the second law, that, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” It certainly sounds interesting and can have broad implications for political strategy. For libertarians in ...

          THE day that I first sat down to write this article I was scrolling Twitter and came across a tweet that read, “Why are there so many sexual deviants in Parliament?” I, of course, gave my two cents and went along my merry way. However, soon after, I paused and realized this was a very important question. To those willing to pay attention we can realize that history is littered with immoral, deviant elites, such as the Late Romans (see Miller 2004), the Habsburgs , and the numerous ones since the 20 th century who have operated sex trafficking rings that have involved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. Why must it be that so frequently the people in charge end up being fiends?           I, therefore, want to take the time in this article to discuss, as I understand it, why our oligarchs tend towards such backwards behavior. What motivates them? What entices them? While some might have the theory t...

  DEMOCRACY , oh how we love it! Practically everyone knows this word, especially in the West. Democracy is synonymous with freedom, and the form of government common in the West is referred to as “liberal democracy” . In America, we are told we live in a representative democracy (i.e., a republic) and this is what makes us awesome. The American Left rallies behind the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Socialists of America. It seems everyone acknowledges that democracy is cool. Rule by the people, as it literally means in Greek, is the most logical because every individual has their rights, and every individual deserves their voice in government. Even from a collectivist perspective, the whole collective – which “the people”, a collective noun, represents – deserves to be involved in matters of administration/political deliberation. However, not everyone is on board with this political system, to many’s surprise. Indeed, democracy has been criticized for as long as it has ex...

  The following article is taken from the Mises Institute article “Marx as Utopian” , itself taken from Rothbard (2006), pp. 364-366. The republication of this article on this site is in accordance with the Mises Institute’s CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 copyright as I have given attribution, do not make any money from this site, and have not altered the original material.   DESPITE Marx’s claim to be a “scientific socialist”, scorning all other socialists whom he dismissed as moralistic and “utopian”, it should be clear that Marx himself was even more in the messianic utopian tradition than were the competing “utopians”. For Marx not only sought a future society that would put an end to history: he claimed to have found the path towards that utopia inevitably determined by the “laws of history”. But a utopian, and a fierce one, Marx certainly was. A hallmark of every utopia is a militant desire to put an end to history, to freeze mankind in a static state, to put an end to diversity...

            SOCIALISTS  have a very high view of themselves because they have a very low view of capitalism. Capitalism, for them, is an exploitative, aristocratic, and chaotic ideology that promotes might-makes-right morals and feudalistic tyranny. That socialism promotes the fulfillment and humanity of the worker, that capitalism commodifies and alienates people , these ideas are represented in the posters, logos, quotes, and articles of socialism (just browse the Jacobin or WSWS). Socialists are the moral Übermenschen of human civilization/philosophy, while anyone who does not endorse their noble, egalitarian, collectivist ways are evil greedy bourgeois ; yes, even if you are a poor proletarian yourself .           Yet, despite the very confident and endearing self-image they possess, socialists seem to have time and time again contradicted basic morality. Many socialist regimes launched pogroms and pu...