Hans Hoppe’s famous “argumentation ethics” has generated a great deal of attention among libertarians, and deservedly so. Has Hoppe produced an ironclad demonstration that people have libertarian rights? I don’t propose to contribute to that discussion on this occasion. Rather, I should like to focus on a preliminary issue. It is one to which
Eric Mack is one of the foremost contemporary philosophers who support the free market. He has for many years been concerned with the “anarchist-minarchist” dispute. In a “state of nature” in which people’s rights to self-ownership and private property are generally recognized, most individuals would find it in their interest to hire private
John Finnis, for many years a professor at Oxford, is one the world’s greatest legal philosophers. Along with the late Germain Grisez, he is the foremost defender of a version of natural law theory called “new classical natural law theory.” In his fullest account of his legal theory, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford 1980), he argues that the
Critics of Austrian economics often say that praxeology lacks rigor. Praxeologists rely on imprecise verbal logic that is difficult to assess. Instead, modern neoclassical economics is to a large extent couched in mathematics. The definitions and axioms of the model used are stated exactly, and then theorems can be proved to follow from them.
The philosopher Michael Huemer is usually favorable to the free market, and he is also a strong defender of anarchism. Although I disagree with some of the arguments in his defense of anarchism, The Problem of Political Authority , it is an excellent book. In a recent blog post , he surprisingly suggests that taxation may in some cases be
Roger Crisp is a well-regarded philosopher and has written important books on ethical theory and its history with a concentration on the British utilitarians. But in an article that appeared in the New Statesman on August 10, he presents one of the strangest arguments I’ve ever read. Crisp asks us to imagine that an asteroid is about to hit the
Some economists are good at political philosophy as well. Mises and Rothbard of course come to mind, but the good philosophers aren’t confined to Austrian school economists. Amartya Sen and Kenneth Arrow know what they are talking about when it comes to philosophy, agree with them or not. But some eminent economists don’t, and, judging by Nicholas
Left-leaning economists often look back with nostalgia to the 1950s. Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty, for example, long for the 1950s, when the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor was less than it is now. True, people were less well-off then than now, but why does this matter? It is better to be equal in misery than unequal in
You will not be surprised to learn that my answer is no, but what I’d like to discuss in this week’s column is an argument by an eminent philosopher that we should. Robert Hanna is an authority on Kant (Objectivist readers will already see trouble ahead), and in an article published online this month, “ Gun Crazy: A Moral Argument for Gun
Critics of egalitarianism, meaning by that equality, or close to it, of income and wealth among the members of a society, often claim that it rests on envy. In response, defenders say that there are respectable reasons to favor equality. (I’m assuming that envy doesn’t count as a respectable reason.) For instance, it can be argued that inequality
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.