Mises Search

The idea of freedom has always had its critics, those who believe that coercive force is required for society to flourish and that the rule of law needs to be supplemented by proactive government policies. Michael Kelly, editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine and a very fine writer–thinker on many fronts, has offered his own criticism of the

After a federal district judge recently ordered the prohibition of all new oil drilling along the California coast, an anti-drilling spokesperson declared the ruling “a victory for the California coast.” This is an interesting, if terribly confusing, notion. There was no fight between the California coast and anyone, not even between the coast and

Let us examine the tragic story out of Florida of the young boy whose arm was severed by a shark and then reattached, after the shark was killed by a ranger.  MSNBC describes the dramatic events: Jessie was attacked by a seven-foot bull shark while playing knee-deep in water at Gulf Islands National Seashore near Fort Pickens, in the Florida

Suppose someone defined the game of golf in terms of riding in carts, wearing funny pants and large shirts, and occasionally using the various clubs to beat one’s dog. Would this be fair? Chances are, someone who gave such a definition of the game would probably be on a warpath to disparage it, encourage attacks on it, not to explain its true

Sometime during the 1970s I was closely associated with the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Department of Philosophy, struggling to develop and explore my classical liberal, libertarian, and Objectivist (or neo-Aristotelian) ideas and gain for them some respect among the faculty and students. I had very limited success--indeed, may be

The famous  calculation problem facing centrally planned economies, identified by Ludwig von Mises and his followers, and the famous tragedy of the commons hinted at early on by Thucydides and Aristotle and developed more fully by Garret Hardin, are, in effect, two sides of the same coin. The one side is the description, and the other the

The Free Market 16, no. 5 (May 1998)   For years I received the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes mailing and just tossed it. No way would I waste my time for what amounts to a minuscule chance to win a bundle of dough. Sure, some folks win, but they are extremely few. The gimmicks were too obvious. (”When you win, do you want a red, green,

The Free Market 17, no. 7 (July 1999)   Free markets may be productive, a common complaint runs, but they lead to unjust results. For instance, writing in The New Republic (March 29, 1999) Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago School of Law closes a book review this way: A familiar problem with unrestricted free markets is that they can

In his recent work, Tyranny and Legitimacy, James Fishkin advances an argument against Roben Nozick’s theory of, what Fishkin calls, “absolute rights” by trying to demonstrate that such a theory would legitimate tyranny. Volume 6, Number 3 (1982) Machan, Tibor. “Fishkin on Nozick’s Absolute Rights.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 6, No. 3

In this note I will argue that social contract theories aimed at establishing norms for personal and community life are inadequate. Briefly, I show that in Kant and Rawls the alleged contractual basis for the legitimacy of law and government is supplemented with the very strict requirement of self-consistency of the resulting norms. Once, however,