Bulletin: Sex and Economics — A Modest Proposal [pdf] Text by Stephen R.C. Hicks Graphics by Christopher Vaughan Permanent URL Fellow citizens: Our nation’s sex life is in peril. Surveys show widespread sexual discontent. Market failure is everywhere. Many males complain of not getting enough sex and many females object to constant male looks and […]
From the Office of the Reproducer-General [press release] Read More »
Strategy question: Does one plunge into political activism—or will political efforts not be effective until the broader culture is ready for it? A common response is to say “Politics is downstream from culture.” Here is one datum, from Philip Reiff: “[T]he first Christian culture revolution accommodated itself from the beginning to the ruling classes of
How do political cultures change? Read More »
I had no idea until I read this in Hugh Barnes’s Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg: “Until the end of the eighteenth century, even houses of wealthy Russians were barely distinguishable from peasant huts.” Who knew? (File under Humor, Sarcasm.) More on Gannibal and Gannibal.
18th-century Russia as egalitarian paradise Read More »
Below is the transcript. Or here in PDF. The lecture is part of the Business Ethics Cases series. The Tragedy of the Commons (transcript) Video lecture by Stephen Hicks, Ph.D. Transcription by Matheus Pacini. Part 1: What the Tragedy Is [Video clip 1] The Tragedy of the Commons is a foundational case study in business
Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power explanation for how the pathetic morality of the weak can prevail over the strong. “The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership” (section 863). In the first essay of Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche raises a historical puzzle. He has contrasted
Nietzsche as public choice theorist Read More »
Five quotations from Ludwig von Mises from five works on his opposition to anarchism: “Society cannot do without a social apparatus of coercion and compulsion, i.e., without state and government.” The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p. 90. “There are people who call government an evil, although a necessary evil. However, what is needed in order to attain
Mises on Anarchism Read More »
Robert Heilbroner was the most famous American socialist intellectual of the 20th century. His The Worldly Philosophers sold millions, making it the second-best-selling economics textbook of all time. In my Business and Economic Ethics course, we read and discuss one of his articles. Here is Heilbroner, writing in 1980, about who owns what under socialism:
Robert Heilbroner on socialism’s mandatory labor Read More »
Returning to this graphic’s placement of Michel Foucault on the spectrum between Marx and Heidegger. Why? Recall Foucault’s own words:: “I am simply a Nietzschean.” And: “Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher.”* Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. Foucault was a member of the
Why Foucault as “basically a Nazi”? Read More »