Libertarian Papers

Many years after the Great Depression and World War II, controversy continues to swirl as scholars, pundits, and ordinary citizens look back at the watershed events of the 1930s and 1940s.

Abstract: The classical formulation of libertarianism seems to be incompatible with the requirements of political legitimacy. Some libertarians have endorsed this result, denying that the state is legitimate. This paper argues, however, that the particular nature of that incompatibility represents a problem for the classical formulation of libertarianism. It is argued that acknowledging the existence of a particular minimal form of positive rights might overcome the problem in question. It is further argued that acknowledgment of such positive rights would seem to provide a more adequate normative ground for making sense of some central libertarian insights and concerns.

Abstract: It is widely thought that Robert Nozick’s views on rectification of past injustices  are of critical importance to his theory of distributive justice, even perhaps justifying wholesale redistributive taxes in the present because of the undoubted injustices that have pervaded much past history. This essay undertakes to correct this impression—not mostly by disagreeing with Nozick’s claims, but nevertheless proceeding on basic libertarian theory. Of enormous importance is the role of putative innocents, who are defrauded by miscreants carefully covering their tracks so that these recipients have no reason to think they are buying stolen property. But of equal importance is simply that the duty to rectify past injustices is not comparable to the original duty to respect property rights in the first place.

University of Waterloo

Abstract: The long stagflation in the nineteen-seventies broke the Keynesian hold on economic policy. Last year we witnessed the spectacular unraveling of neo-liberal policies of manipulating money and credit. While these episodes might be studied to explain the specific weaknesses and errors of each of the two policy paradigms that have dominated in the West after the Second World War, this lecture highlights the ideas and presuppositions that remained in place throughout the whole period. Despite the alliance that once existed between libertarians and classical liberals, on the one hand, and neo-liberals, on the other hand, the latter did not have sufficiently coherent conceptions of freedom and free markets to produce a true alternative for the Keynesian idea of a scientifically managed economy as a utilitarian and pragmatic approach to the utopian goal of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, i.e., complete well-being for all.

Frank van Dun

Volume 1, Article 9 (2009)

I cannot begin my lecture without first expressing all my deep gratitude to the Mises Institute, which honors me