Forgotten Lessons : Selected Essays of John T. Flynn

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"This collection of essays and articles provides a small sampling of Flynn's work, as well as a look at some of the great themes that animated the Old Right. The articles and essays in this volume were chosen to highlight Flynn's advocacy of limitations on the intrusive, interventionist state, and the disastrous consequences of allowing those limitations to relax. Many of his warnings revolve around the dangers of economic planning and political manipulation of the market, debt financing of government spending, militarism, and war. Flynn regarded each of these evils as interrelated. In his view, interventionism on the domestic front leads inexorably to intervention in foreign affairs. Thus, Flynn regarded U.S. intervention in World War II as the inevitable consequence of Roosevelt's New Deal policies. In many ways, Flynn was the first to outline the true nature of the twentieth-century welfare-warfare state.

"This is troubling stuff for a generation of conservatives raised on the military Keynesianism known as Reaganism. But the Cold War is over, and the conservatism of the welfare-warfare state has little to offer to a new era. The wisdom of an older generation beckons. If we have the good sense to pay heed to the lessons offered by Flynn and his Old Right cohorts, we may summon the courage and moral authority to harness the Leviathan let loose by the Roosevelt revolution. We can then bequeath the next generation a nation dedicated to the forgotten principles of peace and freedom."

Franklin D. Roosevelt personally tried to get John T. Flynn blacklisted. To read this great journalist is to understand why. In Flynn the spirit of Jefferson lived vigilantly, with learned, witty scorn for tyranny and fraud. His words still puncture. -- Joseph Sobran, syndicated columnist