Friday Philosophy

The philosopher Roger Crisp has asked us to consider the bright side of the wholesale extinction of sentient life: a lot of suffering would be prevented.

Michael Huemer has recently come up with some cases in which taxation is justified. Is it, though?

Isn’t the Austrian school behind the times in not availing itself of the modern tools that mathematics provides? One of the world's greatest living mathematicians doesn't think so.

Do people have a duty of distributive justice, leaving the state aside?

 According to customary analysis, public goods will not be supplied efficiently. But it does not follow that the good will not be supplied at all, or in a quantity insufficient to “do the job.”

If scarcity is at the root of all conflict, what does that tell us about rights?

There's a problem in a discipline when scholars don't realize that a view is controversial and needs to be supported by argument. Deirdre McCloskey is one such scholar. 

There are only two ways to organize production in a complex modern economy: by centralized decision-making or through the free market. Only one of these alternatives is a real option.

Mises was strongly committed to Darwinism, but, he says, the social Darwinists drew the wrong lessons from evolution. The onset of the division of labor changes biological competition into social competition, in which no one is annihilated. 

Capitalism isn't unique to any particular group. People with the drive to save and invest have always existed; but the idea that this instinct was immoral had to be overcome for markets to flourish. 

When the subjective theory was formulated in the 1870s, it suffered from the defect of wrongly thinking that economic calculation could occur without prices. This defect gave socialists help in making their case.

Practically everyone wants material prosperity. For this reason, Mises argued, the marketplace is the one place where humanity can come within reach of rational agreement.

Before economic theory got started, philosophers studied political and economic affairs from a normative standpoint. The advent of subjectivism showed that there are regularities across all human action that limit what political action can achieve.

Steven Smith thinks that nationalism and globalism both are "pathologies" that afflict patriotism. He thinks a moderate course will get people to embrace the state as their highest political value.

It is no surprise that the corporate media tends to showcase and honor experts whose views tend to reflect the views of media pundits and editors themselves. The idea that the public might prefer other experts leaves these pundits in dismay.  

Senator Hawley wants government regulation of social media, and he insists that social media companies are somehow controlling and manipulating people. But Hawley is mistaken. You have free will even when using Facebook.

When people think of Rothbard as a philosopher, they often have in mind only his work in ethics and political philosophy, but he wrote about other areas of philosophy as well.

I want to use an argument someone directed against Rawls to illustrate a basic principle of how we should read texts.

The Marxist concept of exploitation arises from a deep question Marx asked: Why do capitalists earn interest?

Without the labor theory of value's assumption of a natural price that explains what is “really” going on beneath the veil of supply and demand, there is no mystification involved in capitalist production.