The British philosopher Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was by no means a libertarian. So far as I know, his political views were conventionally leftist. But he destroys egalitarianism with his levelling down objection . If you say that equality of wealth or income is morally required, aren’t you committed to the following strange consequence? A
Sometimes critics of praxeology make this complaint about it. Praxeology is supposed to be logically deduced from the concept of action (Mises) or from the action axiom (Rothbard). If so, these deductions should be set down in rigorous form. We need to know what exactly follows from what. To do this, ordinary language isn’t adequate. Praxeology
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) had a great influence on Murray Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought . (Incidentally, this is my favorite of Rothbard’s books—it’s enormously learned and insightful.) This at first seems surprising. Though people differ about what Kuhn meant, many take
The philosopher Robert Nozick raises some important criticisms of Austrian economics in his “On Austrian Methodology.” This paper came out in 1970 and it is conveniently available in Nozick’s Socratic Puzzles (Harvard, 1998). I’m going to talk about a couple of the criticisms here. You might think that I don’t have to do this. The libertarian
Some remarks in Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism shed light on a puzzling passage in Human Action . The passage is puzzling because it goes counter to what one would expect Mises to say. Mises, although not an anarchist, was an extremely strict classical liberal. No reader of his Liberalism can doubt his full commitment to liberty. Conscription into
Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand held very different views about the origins of Nazism, and in this article I am going to describe these differences. My aim is limited to that. I’m not going to assess these arguments. Rand’s explanation for the rise of Nazism is found in Leonard Peikoff’s 1982 book The Ominous Parallels . Although Rand didn’t write
In an article published in Italian on April 13 and translated here into English, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben raises some points that merit careful consideration. He says, “We then accepted without too many problems, solely in the name of a risk that it was not possible to specify, limiting, to an extent that had never happened
Eminent domain gives the government the power to take over private property for public use. A popular argument that this interference with private property is needed goes like this: We can’t measure subjective utility, but we can take increases in wealth as a rough proxy for increases in utility. (This assumption is mistaken, but I won’t get into
I’d like to continue the discussion of Scott Sehon’s article “ No, the Nazis Were Not Socialists ” that I began last week. At the end of my article, I berated Sehon. He says that the word “socialist” in the name of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) doesn’t show that the Nazis were really socialist. I complained, “Sehon is
The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return by Michael Anton Regnery Publishing, 2020 441 pages Michael Anton is best known to the public through his essay “The Flight 93 Election,” published in 2016 under a pseudonym in the Claremont Review of Books . It warned of the dire consequences if Hillary Clinton were elected. Anton, an authority on
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.