Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

My upcoming lectures at Universidad Francisco Marroquín

From November 3 to 6, I will be giving an invited series of lectures and seminars (nine hours worth of them!) at the Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala.

My general themes will be entrepreneurship, ethics, philosophy, and political economy.

The times titles of my various talks are as follows.

Open Lecture (Thursday, November 3): “Entrepreneurs and Philosophers: Why a Philosophy of Freedom Matters.”

Luncheon Seminar (Friday, November 4): “Economics as a Value Science.”

Full-day Seminar (Saturday, November 5): “Philosophy for Economists and Economics for Philosophers.” Sub-units for the day:

1. Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy

2. On the Best Arguments against Free-Market Capitalism
“Socialism is moral even if it isn’t practical.”
“Wealth is a social creation.”
“We live in a world of scarce resources.”
“The free market is dog-eat-dog.”
“Humans are too depraved for freedom.”
“Humans are too incompetent for freedom.”
“Value is not of the material world.”

3. Ethics and Political-Economy
Entrepreneurship and Virtue Ethics
Objective, Subjective, and Intrinsic Value
Egoism, Altruism, and Predation
The Entrepreneurial Life

4. Government in a Free Society
What government is—the what and the how
Legislating morality

5. The Case for the Free Society
Moral and Economic Arguments for Freedom
Empirical Data and Theoretical Principles
“What” and “How” Arguments
Integrating Friedman, Hayek, and Rand
The Positive and the Negative Cases for Freedom

6. Freedom and the Meaning of Life

Thanks to UFM’s Centro Henry Hazlitt for sponsoring my visit.

APEE talk on the mixed economy

At the APEE conference next month in Las Vegas, I will be presenting “The Evolution of the Mixed Economy - A Schematic Approach.”

My talk integrates themes from several major thinkers from whom I have learned a great deal: Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock.

The talk’s outline is based on this flow chart posted earlier under the title “Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess).”

For the conference I’ve also organized two other sessions: Ethics and the Financial Crisis and Reason in Hayek and Rand.

Here is the full conference schedule.

Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess)

Putting into one flowchart what I have learned from Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock.

The flowchart is in spreadsheet format: the short version and the long version in Excel 2007 or in Excel 97-2003. Update: DJ Dates has a cool, scalable Google maps version of the flowchart at his website.

Feel welcome to modify and add to as you wish.

I’m in the midst of discussing this material in my Business and Economic Ethics course, in a unit on business ethics in a mixed economy.

For reference purposes:

Academic title: “The Sociology of Dysfunctional Nonstandard Political-Economic Systems.”

Public Intellectual title: “The Evolution of the Mixed Economy.”

Casual title: “How We Got Into This Frackin’ Mess.”