The costs of war : America's pyrrhic victories / edited with an introduction by John V. Denson.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 509-516) and index.

1. War and American Freedom / John V. Denson -- 2. Classical Republicanism and the Right to Bear Arms / Samuel Francis -- 3. Defenders of the Republic: The Anti-Interventionist Tradition in American Politics / Justin Raimondo -- 4. America's Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861 / Murray N. Rothbard -- 5. Rethinking Lincoln / Richard Gamble -- 6. Did the South Have to Fight? / Thomas Fleming -- 7. War, Reconstruction, and the End of the Old Republic / Clyde Wilson -- 8. The Spanish-American War as Trial Run, or Empire as Its Own Justification / Joseph R. Stromberg -- 9. World War I: The Turning Point / Ralph Raico -- 10. World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals / Murray N. Rothbard -- 11. A Common Design: Propaganda and World War / David Gordon -- 12. Rethinking Churchill / Ralph Raico -- 13. The Old Breed and the Costs of War / Eugene B. Sledge -- 14. War and Leviathan in Twentieth-Century America: Conscription as the Keystone / Robert Higgs --

15. The Military as an Engine of Social Change / Allan Carlson -- 16. His Country's Own Heart's-Blood: American Writers Confront War / Bill Kauffman -- 17. The Culture of War / Paul Fussell -- 18. Is Modern Democracy Warlike? / Paul Gottfried -- 19. War and the Money Machine: Concealing the Costs of War Beneath the Veil of Inflation / Joseph T. Salerno -- 20. Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization: From Monarchy to Democracy / Hans-Hermann Hoppe -- App. A1. General Robert E. Lee's Reply to Lord Acton -- App. A2. Mark Twain's War Prayer -- App. A3. Representative Claude Kitchin's Speech Opposing President Wilson's Request for a Declaration of War.

The greatest accomplishment of Western civilization is arguably the achievement of individual liberty through limits on the power of the state. In the war-torn twentieth century, we rarely hear that one of the main costs of armed conflict is long-term loss of liberty to winners and losers alike.

Beyond the obvious and direct costs of dead and wounded soldiers, there is the lifetime struggle of veterans to live with their nightmares and their injuries; the hidden economic costs of inflation, debts, and taxes; and more generally the damages caused to our culture, our morality, and to civilization at large. This second edition represents a large-scale collective effort to pierce the veils of myth and propaganda to reveal the true costs of war, above all, the cost to liberty.