Robert Higgs

If Robert Higgs had written only one book, the magisterial Crisis and Leviathan, his place would be forever secure in the libertarian firmament. ... In an interview with ... Paul Craig Roberts (... 2003) Higgs elaborated on the theme of the book. 'In countless ways, the warfare state has proved inimical to the preservation of liberty,' he said. 'War brings higher taxes, greater government debt, increased government intrusion in markets, more pervasive government surveillance, manipulation, and control of the public. Going to war is the perfect recipe for expanding the size, scope, and power of the federal government.'

Robert Higgs is Retired Senior Fellow in Political Economy, Founding Editor and former Editor at Large of the Independent Institute's quarterly journal The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow for the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.

Palpatine assures the Senators:

"It is with great reluctance that I have agreed to this calling. I love democracy! I love the Republic! Once this crisis has abated, I will lay down the powers you have given me."

... The emergency-propelled rise ... fits with Robert Higgs's broader insight that crisis is the health of Leviathan ... As Higgs detailed, the expansions of state size and power that occur during a war or other emergency are generally scaled back after the crisis passes, but never all the way down to the pre-crisis level. Thus, the power of the state ratchets up with every war.

Robert Higgs, a political economist who taught at several universities and who now edits the Independent Review, says "There's no libertarian moment now. Times such as the present are most difficult because crisis conditions always make the general public more submissive to authority than usual ..." Higgs spent decades documenting this process of "crisis opportunism." His 1987 classic, "Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government," lays out what most of us know intuitively. Government grows via what he calls the "ratchet effect" ...: periods of relative stasis followed by spasms of activity.

In his book Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs showed how wars and economic crises help to expand the power of government and diminish individual liberties. In one example, he showed how the Wilson administration overcame the opposition of Americans to involvement in World War I by hiding its true costs. Instead of relying on free-market purchases to acquire needed resources (and reveal all costs), the government resorted to command-and-control measures and propaganda ... Higgs [also] outlined an argument used during World War II to justify centralized economic controls ...

Thank goodness for Robert Higgs, a historian of political economy and senior fellow at the Independent Institute ... His recent collection ... Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, somewhat of a sequel to his academic masterpiece of 20 years ago, Crisis and Leviathan, fills the gap in empirical evidence where we have previously had primarily theory to guide us. He thoroughly examines the political economy of the United States from the Great Depression to the end of the Cold War ... In his area of focus, he has almost surely delved further than any economist before him.

Bob is one of our greatest living scholars. Specializing in economic history, Bob's first major work is his 1976 book, "Competition and Coercion." In it, Bob documents the many ways that economic competition—including people's ability to move from place to place—enabled blacks to improve their economic situation after the Civil War. These improvements came despite the bigotry that then reigned in the South—and despite the activities of government ... Bob's most famous book is his 1987 study, "Crisis and Leviathan." ... Another of Bob's key contributions is his identification of the role of "regime uncertainty."

Even Americans who detest war and recognize that nearly every war is the product of mendacious, power-hungry political leaders generally make an exception for World War II, the so-called Good War. They believe that the Americans fought for an entirely good and proper cause ... Some of the actions [Edgar L. Jones] described in ["One War Is Enough"] may come as a shock to many readers today; they're not the sort of actions John Wayne was taking in all those postwar movies about World War II. Yet, over the years, many soldier-memoirists ... and many historians ... have confirmed them.

My idea of a great president is one who acts in accordance with his oath of office to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Not since the presidency of Grover Cleveland has any president achieved greatness by this standard. Worse, the most admired have been those who failed most miserably ... American liberty will never be reestablished so long as elites and masses alike look to the president to perform supernatural feats ... Until we can restore limited, constitutional government in this country, God save us from great presidents.

Although relatively few libertarians are pacifists, libertarians tend to be substantially less bellicose than the average citizen. Modern libertarianism has deep roots in classical liberalism, an ideology that looks at war as a reactionary undertaking at odds with the social progress that springs, in large part, from the unhampered movement of goods, capital, and labor across national borders ... [Tolstoy] also came to understand that governments consist of stationary bandits who induce their subjects to submit to robbery and other crimes by a combination of threats and propaganda.

On May 27, President George W. Bush delivered a speech at the graduation ceremonies of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. He spoke about the military actions that U.S. forces are currently conducting in the Middle East and elsewhere. ... In a more fundamental sense, however, every person the U.S. forces have killed in Iraq is the victim of a murder, because the U.S. forces had no just grounds for invading and occupying the country in the first place—this war is a textbook case of unprovoked aggression—and the Iraqis and their friends have a just right of self-defense against these violent foreign invaders.

A viper lived in Johnny's house, so
all in the family understood
that they must watch their steps although
the snake had not struck–they knew it could.

One day Johnny ventured to query
why they kept a serpent at home;
he asked his father, who seemed leery
of respond-ing: "Go and ask your mom."
...
To everyone's great surprise, it seemed,
the day dawned as bright as before:
security reigned and prospe-rity gleamed
and no menaces came to their door.

The viper, they now realized, had
been evil all right, but unneeded,
and his absence made everyone glad.
Johnny's bold stroke entirely succeeded.

Q: Who is your greatest inspiration?
A: Early in my training as an economist, I was inspired by Simon Kuznets and Douglass C. North. Soon afterward, I took considerable inspiration from Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, and Armen Alchian and from economic historians such as Nathan Rosenberg, Robert Fogel, and Stanley Engerman, among others. Later still, Schumpeter, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, and James Buchanan exerted greater influence on my thinking. In retrospect, I regard Mises as the giant among these figures.

[T]he Institute is known for is its scholarly journal The Independent Review ...
Our quarterly journal, The Independent Review, is edited by the distinguished economist and historian, Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy at [the] Institute ...
I would strongly suggest that your readers read Crisis and Leviathan, by Robert Higgs, in order to understand the nature of government power and what is going on now. Higgs authoritatively documents how and why "War is the health of the state." If you have not read this book and/or articles based on it, you cannot really understand liberty and be effective in combating statism.