We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now

We Who Dared to Say No to War uncovers some of the forgotten but compelling body of work from the American antiwar tradition—speeches, articles, poetry, book excerpts, political cartoons, and more—from people throughout our history who have opposed war. Beginning with the War of 1812, these selections cover every major American war up to the present and come from both the left and the right, from religious and secular viewpoints. There are many surprises, including a forgotten letter from a Christian theologian urging Confederate President Jefferson Davis to exempt Christians from the draft and a speech by Abraham Lincoln opposing the 1848 Mexican War. Among others, Daniel Webster, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Grover Cleveland, Eugene Debs, Robert Taft, Paul Craig Roberts, Patrick Buchanan, and Country Joe and the Fish make an appearance. This first-ever anthology of American antiwar writing offers the full range of the subject's richness and variety.

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Liberty Portal is your gateway for free markets and free thinking. We aggregate open-sourced content to promote and popularize important people and lessons within the liberty movement.

suggested

Frederic Bastiat

The Law

Read this for FREE at mises.org

The Law, originally published as a pamphlet in 1850. It defines, through development, a just system of laws and then demonstrates how such law facilitates a free society. In The Law, he wrote that everyone has a right to protect "his person, his liberty, and his property". The State should be only a "substitution of a common force for individual forces" to defend this right. "Justice" (defense of one's life, liberty, property) has precise limits, but if government power extends further, into philanthropic endeavors, government becomes so limitless that it can grow endlessly. The resulting statism is "based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator." The public then becomes socially-engineered by the legislator and must bend to the legislators' will "like the clay to the potter": "I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law – by force – and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes". Bastiat posits that the law becomes perverted when it punishes one's right to self-defense (of his life, liberty, and property) in favor of another's right to "legalized plunder," which he defines as: "if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." Bastiat was thus against redistribution.

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Lew Rockwell

Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto

Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto diagnoses what is wrong with the American political system and tells us what we need to fix things. The cure is a radical one because, as the book incontrovertibly shows, the many problems that confront us today are no accident. They stem from the nature of government itself. Only peaceful cooperation based on the free market can rescue us from our present plight.

Against the State is written by Lew Rockwell, the founder of the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com, and the closest friend and associate of Murray Rothbard, the leading theorist of anarcho-capitalism. Rockwell applies Rothbard’s combination of individualist anarchism and Austrian economics to contemporary America. The book shows how the government is based on war, both against foreign nations and against the American people themselves, through massive invasions of our liberties. Fueled by an out-of-control banking system, the American State has become in essence fascist. We cannot escape our predicament through limited government: the government is incapable of controlling itself. Only a purely private social order can save us, and Rockwell succinctly sets out how an anarcho-capitalist order would work.

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Murray Rothbard

For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

A classic that for over two decades has been hailed as the best general work on libertarianism available. Rothbard begins with a quick overview of its historical roots, and then goes on to define libertarianism as resting "upon one single axiom: that no man or group of men shall aggress upon the person or property of anyone else." He writes a withering critique of the chief violator of liberty: the State. Rothbard then provides penetrating libertarian solutions for many of today's most pressing problems, including poverty, war, threats to civil liberties, the education crisis, and more.

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