The question of how to objectively determine damages for negligence (tort) in a libertarian system often arises. There is not much solid, libertarian analysis out there on this issue–the answers are usually either positivistic and assume some presumptive validity of common law rules; or they are libertarian but without much mooring in any coherent
President Obama just revealed at the New Hampshire “town hall” that he rejected Federal government supplied insurance for himself and his family when he was in the U.S. Senate, and instead of the government regulated stuff he took advantage of his wife’s private insurance supplied via her $317,000 per year political fixer/politician’s wife job
I first met Larry Moss in 1966. He was a first year economics graduate student at Columbia University; I was one year ahead of him there, in my second year. It soon became clear that we were on the same wavelength as far as political economy was concerned; he and I were part of a small band of free enterprisers at Columbia, surrounded by a bunch
In this post , Monsanto’s General Counsel disagrees with Google’s Head of Patents and General Counsel, who had complained about the risks companies like Google face from huge damage awards in patent lawsuits. I am so tired of patent lawyers and companies with vested interests making the tired old argument that we should not “weaken” patent
Thus does Thom Hartmann at the Huffington Post say that “The intellectual forefathers and mothers of the insane conservative economic policies that have brought us to where we are include Ludwig Von Mises, Freidrich Von Hayeck (sic.)...” Never mind that Mises and Hayek were the 20th century’s premier opponents of loose money and central banking
Just came across an interesting blogpost by one Bary Stocker, a “British philosopher based in Istanbul”: Hoppe: Habermas’ Anarcho-Conservative Student . See also Revisiting Argumentation Ethics ; Discourse Ethics entry in Wikipedia (which yours truly started); Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics ; my New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights
I wrote previously on the Troll Tracker case (see Update on Patent Troll Tracker ; Troll Tracker Lands Job Fighting Patent Trolls! ). This case concerns defamation suits filed against “Troll Tracker,” aka Rick Frenkel, by two Texas lawyers, in the aftermath of Frenkel’s identity being revealed, after bounties put up by one of the subjects of his
I don’t think I’ve pushed this before, but “ Master Resource ,” a new free market energy blog, is in full swing. Not everyone posting there is necessarily an Austrian (though some of us are), but everybody is definitely aware of the problems of government intervention. More important, the posters really know what they are talking about. In
On occasion you get some defender of patents who is upset when we use the m-word to describe these artificial state-granted monopoly rights. For example here one Dale Halling, a patent attorney (surprise!) posts about “The Myth that Patents are a Monopoly” and writes, ” People who suggest a patent is a monopoly are not being intellectually honest
Physicist Howard Hayden, a staunch advocate of sound energy policy, sent me a copy of his letter to the EPA about global warming. The text is also appended below, with permission. As noted in my post Access to Energy , Hayden helped the late, great Petr Beckmann found the dissident physics journal Galilean Electrodynamics (brochures and further
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.