Notes & asides.

* Memo

To: WFB

From: Dorothy McCartney

Did you see the article by Bill Steigerwald in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, headlined "Rothbard Nailed the GOP Drift"? Here is what Steigerwald wrote. You may want to comment:

 
   Why has the party of Lincoln-which 
   once stood for a small, constitutional government 
   that kept its hands off most things 
   at home and minded its own business 
   abroad-become the party of Roosevelt 
   and Wilson? ... 
 
      Some say Republicans have merely 
   fallen in love with power. Or that their 
   party has been hijacked by the neo-conservatives, 
   those brainy ex-liberal 
   Democrats who took us crusading in the 
   Middle East and never stopped adoring 
   Big Momma Government. 
 
      Whatever it was that turned Republicans 
   bad, it didn't begin after 9/11. 
 
      In 1968, Murray Rothbard, the late, 
   great economist/historian, was bashing 
   the unhealthy leftward drift of the 
   American Right, which he 
   argued had already abandoned 
   its "determined opposition 
   to Big Government" and 
   "become the conservative wing 
   of the American corporate state 
   and its foreign policy of expansionist 
   imperialism." ... 
 
      An enemy of every inch of the welfare- 
   warfare state, Rothbard especially 
   was displeased with the aggressive anti- 
   Communism of William F. Buckley Jr., 
   whose NATIONAL REVIEW magazine in 
   1955 became the official clubhouse of the 
   post-WWII "New Right" and ideological 
   incubator of the Reagan Revolution. 
 
      Rothbard's excellent essay, posted at 
   lewrockwell.com, includes a quote from 
   a 1952 Commonweal magazine article 
   by Buckley that spelled out what winning 
   the Cold War was going to cost 
   Americans. 
 
      While calling himself a libertarian, 
   Buckley posited that the Soviet Union 
   posed such an imminent threat to our 
   security that we had "to accept Big 
   Government for the duration ... for neither 
   an offensive nor a defensive war can 
   be waged ... except through the instrument 
   of a totalitarian bureaucracy within 
   our shores." 
 
      We must therefore all support "large 
   armies and air forces, atomic energy, central 
   intelligence, war production boards 
   and the attendant centralization of power 
   in Washington," wrote Buckley. 

Memo

To: Dorothy