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This article is a revised version of a talk given at the Oxford University Mises Society on January 16, 2024. The talk drew upon themes discussed in David Gordon and Wanjiru Njoya, Redressing Historical Injustice: Self-Ownership, Property Rights and Economic Equality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Supporters of free market capitalism are often

In Against the State , Lew Rockwell  emphasizes that the assault on our liberties from the state is not merely “the product of temporary malfunctions. To the contrary, the state is by nature evil.” Rockwell shows that the state is founded on coercion and maintains its power by use of force. In recent years, following the rise of environmentalism,

It is often argued in “decolonization” debates that each culture must find its own path to economic progress. In this context, the idea of  inclusive economics is that building a diverse society requires economics to take account of “power relations, oppression, qualitative changes in social relations and . . . most importantly, the role of

Ludwig von Mises’s 1927  book Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition is increasingly important in a time when so many conflicting ideologies march under the banner of liberalism. For example, according to the New York Times , “liberal values”  include “racial equality, women’s rights, human rights and democracy.” The New York Times sees “classical

Jeremy Bentham famously regarded natural rights as “nonsense on stilts” and taught that property rights are created by law and enforced by courts. Bentham’s view was that “before the laws, there was no property: take away the laws, all property ceases.” Lawyers in the Benthamite tradition accordingly set out to define the state-created nature of

The boundaries of contemporary public debate are artificially constrained by egalitarian values. Both progressive liberals and classical liberals are opposed to the more-outlandish versions of wokery, but many consider egalitarianism to be a good idea in principle as long as it is not taken “too far” by communist ideologues. The ongoing purge of

The culture wars are often depicted in the press as attacks launched by conservatives who are resistant to cultural change. The Guardian , for example, depicts culture wars as “wedge issues” that are “conjured up” by conservatives in a futile attempt to dictate opinions to voters but which only end up “turning young voters to the left in western

When socialist schemes fail, as they inevitably do, our attention is immediately drawn away from the destruction they cause to the “good intentions” behind the schemes. They meant well. Their good intentions override their disastrous results. One reason why good intentions are important to both sides of the political divide is that good intentions

Those who have (wisely) not been following the “decolonization” debate may be surprised to learn that decolonizers  characterize reason and rationality as cultural constructs that ought to be rejected, as these are said to be “based upon epistemological assumptions deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition” and therefore “perpetuate

The concept of reality is questioned by the notion, as László Krasznahorkai expressed it, that there are “many realities, or none at all.” By contrast, in Human Action , Ludwig von Mises offers a clear concept of reality, which he describes as “the whole complex of all causal relations between events, which wishful thinking cannot alter.” Building