Philosophy and Methodology

[This article is taken from chapter 19 of The Ethics of Liberty.

Economic freedom in fact reduces unemployment to levels significantly below those in less free countries. The Amish may hold the secret to full employment, but rejection of modern capitalism is full employment in poverty and hardship, not the rich fruits of progress.

From the University of Oregon comes this: A psychologist and two ec

In the history of money, bartering was awkward because wants were not divisible. Direct exchange depended upon a double coincidence of wants. Demand for a medium of exchange grew until a general medium of exchange emerged, like gold and silver.

In If Men Were Angels Robert Higgs analyzes James Madison’s famous pass

All action is really exchange. What the actor prefers less is exchanged for something he prefers more, including gift giving. It is a fallacy to say that the goods exchanged have equal value.

The July-August 1983 issue of Libertari

In this first lecture of a series of lectures covering the basics of applied Austrian economics,  Joseph Salerno introduces a number of basic concepts including utility, exchange, psychic cost, choice, value, and marginal utility. 

Robert Nozick, 1938-2002, was a professor at Harvard whose best known book is Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) – a libertarian answer to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). Murray Rothbard, 1926-1995, wrote The Ethics of Liberty as his main political philosophy work.

John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873, was the most famous classical liberal. Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903, was a prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era. Lysander Spooner, 1808-1887, was an American individualist anarchist and abolitionist.