"To me, it is ironic that Hayek wrote "the Road to Serfdom" with the idea in mind that going the way of socialism is guaranteed to produce serfdom, while the evidence now shows that it is the road of unbridled "free market capitalism" that leads to serfdom."

Yawn.

Point us to the free markets.

Or Dole, for that matter.

When it comes to individuals braying about "rights" to products that cannot exist without imputations of human labor, I'd say they've arrived at explicitly endorsing slavery. Health care and secondary education springs immediately to mind, but occasionally you'll hear about high-speed wireless internet and other luxuries, in addition to the "rights" enshrined in law, such as a right to the labor of a lawyer.

Enough can't be said of the albums he recorded. They're great. Well worth tracking down.

Who's this 'we'? Obama had a voting record. Some of us actually consulted it. It wasn't pretty. With whom he and his wife liked to pass the time (James Crown, Chicago Council on Global Affairs) was a matter of public record. Personally, I think the policy trajectory of the Obama administration was for the most part predictable. One had only to look.

I always hate this line of argument. Until the burgeoning radical class finally gets aroused, you'll have condemned scores of individuals who otherwise would not have got involved with the armed forces to enslavement in an imperial military. I understand the argument; nonetheless, I reject it.

Further, would that even work in today's military environment? In Vietnam, you were talking about grunts sent out into the field doing dirty work. Today, for the otherwise non-involved, the draft you speak of might just entail cooling your jets in an air-conditioned room playing video games for four years and I don't think that's enough to stir the kids into radicalism. The youngest draft-age kids today were eight, pressing close now to the reaches of seven, when 9/11 happened. America's war-footing is practically all they've ever known. While it's arguable the Vietnam draft-class grew up with hyperbolic tales of WW2 heroism that may have deadened their awareness of what war really consists of doing and having done to you and still radical reaction to the draft managed to emerge from the murk... I just don't count on it today, with the technological state of affairs being what it is.

Seconding the McCoy book.

Has Scott had him on the show yet?

The GOP's roots are anything but pro-peace... or small government, for that matter. Their first standard bearer brought war and, essentially, dictatorship to American soil and sought an activist government on the model Henry Clay built a career shilling for. The GOP presided over the military occupation of the south and a renewed fervor for violating treaties and fomenting wars with the Native North Americans. The GOP was there, ushering in "the Progressive Era" of activist busy-body government and spreading its tentacles abroad to the Philippines, especially, and outposts ranging from Guam to Santo Domingo. The GOP only ever turned peacenik or small government in reaction to first Woodrow Wilson, then Franklin Roosevelt, the self-same who ran against the bigness of Hooverian Republican government (certainly more activist than the Coolidge "small government" blip... government not small or inactive enough to avoid shooting striking workers) in 1932, before embracing that bigness with gusto in 1933. With the rejection of the Taft campaigns of 1940, 1948, and 1952, the GOP held at bay those small government, non-interventionist impulses and finally fully embraced the big government, warmongering, imperial policies it continues to embrace to this day, opportunistic adoption of Paulist rhetoric notwithstanding.

Out here in Washington state, surrounded on all sides by military bases and military or contractor personnel, forgive me for not picking up on this phantom non-interventionist fad gripping the GOP... it hasn't reached us here. As such, I'm having a difficult time believing any of it is true.